A fraternity without blood ties? Relations between brothers and sisters-in-law in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

Enunciating authority: exonarrative inscriptions on or near miniatures of the Divine Comedy

<i>For gode</i> in Chaucer and the <i>Gawain</i> Poet

Assaf Pinkus’s opening questions in Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany transcend the medieval context of his case studies. Consuming violence through visual culture routinely dominates our modern forms of entertainment. Why is this? What does violence offer its audiences? What inspiration does violence provide to artists? In answering these questions, Pinkus shines a spotlight on a little-studied category of medieval Christian images that he terms “galleries of violence” (2). Monumental martyr cycles crafted in fourteenth-century German-speaking regions convey to their viewers emphatic violence and brutality toward the saintly body, even resulting in the individual erasure of the saint so that only the graphic mutilated body remains. Pinkus argues that these galleries of violence address their viewers through the rhetoric of “visual aggression” producing a somaesthetic experience between object and viewer that he identifies as “bodily imagination” (4–5). Per Pinkus, this instantaneous, corporeal participation refers to “the ways in which the images encouraged viewers, on the one hand to imagine the depicted tortures and pains on and through their own bodies as their own suffering, and on the other hand, to project their own bodies, imaginations, and range of associations related to the visualized torments upon the images” (5).Drawing on a multifaceted methodology, he adopts the language and theory of somaesthetic experience from Richard Shusterman and applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, thereby incorporating detailed iconographic analysis as well as investigating the changing definitions of words used to describe violence in Middle–High German and Latin. Pinkus repeatedly articulates the differences between his “gallery of violence” examples and the oft-studied category of imitatio Christi iconography that were—in the context of manuscript illuminations—primarily the purview of a narrow audience of mystics, members of religious orders, and literates. With this distinction, Pinkus expands beyond the positive associations of blood as a substance primarily communicating not violence but the sacrificial mystery of the Eucharist, as argued by Caroline Walker Bynum. While noting the validity of this interpretation, Pinkus argues that “it is hardly conceivable that the viewers’ immediate encounter with these newly formulated galleries of violence and the brutality of the depictions evoked happiness and love rather than abjection and horror” (26). Instead, the monumental and public character of galleries of violence imagery require looking beyond devotional practice and the easy mapping of violence imagery to the Life of Christ.The first chapter, “Visual Rhetoric,” begins with an examination of the sculpture adorning the portals of Holy Cross Minster in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Pinkus questions how medieval viewers responded to this extreme and graphic violence, emphasizing the importance of bodily response and influence of Thomas Aquinas’s mid-thirteenth-century formulation of the psychosomatic unity of body and soul. This new concern of the fourteenth century is traced through the evolution of words, such as the Middle High German word gewalt, which expanded beyond meaning political power, authority, and dominion to also include violence, or negative physical force on the body that could be evaluated according to legal and ethical metrics. This line of inquiry is continued in the second chapter, “Between Theological and Juridical Positions,” where he turns to another case of exterior sculpture at the Church of St. Theobald at Thann, in Alsace. Using the Annales compiled by local Franciscans, Pinkus grounds the iconographic interpretation of the Thann sculptural program in the region’s local history, such as plague and periodic marauding and attacks. Within this framing, the seemingly unorganized violence of martyrdom resolves into a pictorial program reflecting changing legal standards of verifying truth, privileging eyewitness testimony over the verifying ordeal. The sculpted tortures and martyrdoms showcase not only the bodily suffering of the saint but also reenact “law and authority, suggesting the triumph of reason and offering a model for the local inhabitants to think of themselves as new martyrs” (61).Chapter 3, “Bodily Imagination, Imaged Bodies,” shifts its evidentiary approach to examine two iconographical examples of martyrdom more broadly through the torments of St. Bartholomew and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The framework of somaesthetics proves crucial to this chapter’s analysis that the visualization of pain and bodily violence reflects the movement away from the conventional emotionless and passive acceptance of martyrdom toward expressions of pain and bodily sensation. Chapter 4, “Eroticized and Sexualized Bodies,” continues the focused examination of specific saints from the perspective of gender, analyzing the tortures applied to the bodies of St. Agatha and St. Barbara. With chapters 3 and 4, the role of medium is expanded, supplementing the sculpted violence seen on the facades at Schwäbisch Gmünd and Thann with the illusionistic violence portrayed via two-dimensional painted altarpieces, focusing on fifteenth-century works such as Stefan Lochner’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles. This evidentiary shift culminates in the fifth chapter, “The Body Reincarnated,” where the analysis is refocused upon three quite different objects: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Shreinmadonna, bust reliquaries associated with Cologne’s Cult of the Virgin Martyrs, and a hybrid panel painting of the Crucifixion now located in Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Pinkus employs the better surviving coloration of these objects and their varied “transformative” qualities to interrogate how medium and coloration affect not only the visualization of violence but also the viewer’s somatic interaction with it (99). Building on understandings of the capacity for sculpture to come alive in the medieval imagination, Pinkus concludes that galleries of violence “attack the senses of the viewers through the interplay of composition, color, material and media” making the violence real for the minds and bodies of the viewers through bodily imagination (112).While the chronological scope of this study is quite brief, primarily encompassing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this undergirds his argument about the somatic power of violence imagery as expressed via bodily imagination, thereby reflecting contemporary desires to define violence in the language of ethics and morality as well as setting restrictions upon it and the newly conceptualized physical self. Visual Aggression is not only valuable as a new resource engaging with an infrequently studied category of objects, Pinkus’s analysis of monumental and public facing devotional imagery also provides a much-needed counterpoint to the more frequently discussed objects and devotional practices used by medieval mystics and religious communities. Some questions of audience and the role of location, particularly the perception of violence imagery within the church via painted altarpieces and outside on the facade of sacred space, remain unexplored. Pinkus’s case studies are also firmly grounded in the Christian religious and cultural majority of late medieval Europe. While noting the violence and blame enacted against nearby Jewish communities for the plague and violence that dominate the fourteenth-century Annales of Thann, Pinkus does not discuss whether the evolving artistic innovations or linguistic understandings of violence also appear or prompt reactions in non-Christian contexts, which could be an area for further exploration. Overall, Visual Aggression provides a fascinating new perspective on the visualization of violence in religious contexts, the changing ethical and moral frameworks appearing in artistic exploration of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the power of somatic response and bodily imagination in interpreting violence in medieval Christian practice.

International relations (IR) research has increasingly explored non-Eurocentric histories by analyzing, for example, different historical international systems, societies, and orders beyond Europe, as well as the agency of non-Western polities in constituting world politics (see Phillips and Sharman 2015; Hobson 2020; Spruyt 2020). Before the West contributes to this burgeoning literature. Zarakol offers a longue durée “account of the history of Eastern ‘international relations’” (p. 6), focusing on the interactions between Eurasian polities and the rise and fall of Eurasian world orders between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis starts with the rise of the Mongols and their conquests across Eurasia, resulting in the establishment of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. This historical event constituted the foundation for three successive Eurasian world orders to emerge: the Chinggisid world order of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the post-Chinggisid world order, consisting of the Timurid Empire (Iran and Central Asia) and the Ming Dynasty (China) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and the “global” post-Timurid world order of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which incorporated Eurasian and European polities.

In this chapter, hydrological variability and changes that occurred in the Carpathian Basin are discussed, on millennial, centennial and decadal scale, presenting the results of multiproxy sedimentary research and archaeological investigations. Major topics of the chapter concern water-level and hydroclimatic changes of lakes, wetlands and peat bogs in entire Middle Ages, analysed by using complex multiproxy sedimentary macro-/microfossil-based hydroclimate reconstructions. Based on archaeological evidence, the potential water-level changes of the largest lakes, wetlands and some detected grounwater-table changes are also presented, partly concerning the late early-medieval, but mainly regarding the high-and late-medieval period. Largest in quantity, potential river flood changes, great and extraordinary floods, flood-rich periods, mainly those occurred on the Danube and partly on other rivers, are discussed, detected predominantly in archaeological and partly in sedimentary evidence. Concluding results, a humid period of the sixth–ninth century is followed by a drier period that culminated in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are more complex, but generally wetter conditions were detected that became especially visible in the fifteenth century. The most complex, sedimentary and archaeological set of information, available for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may also pinpoint on multidecadal variations and high water/flood-rich/wetter periods, especially around the turn of the fourteenth–fifteenth and that of the fifteenth–sixteenth century, but on the Danube periods, potentially richer in great floods, were as well suggested for the early and the mid/late thirteenth centhuries that probably extended to the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, significant spatial differences were identified, especially in sedimentary evidence, in water-level and flood changes over the Middle Ages.

Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. By Annabel S. Brett. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 254.) The word ius, as anyone acquainted with medieval juristic or scholastic texts recognizes immediately, poses a baffling array of problems for those who wish to explicate its range of meanings. Annabel Brett has written an important and stimulating book that provides such an explication with respect to scholastic discourse of fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as writings of Spanish Neo-Scholastics of sixteenth century and Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth. In asuming this challenging undertaking, Brett has performed a signal service for scholars. Our knowledge of uses to which this term was put has been enriched substantially by her work. Brett's work is divisible into two large sections, each consisting of three chapters. In first half of her book, she addresses formation of scholastic discourse of individual rights. She begins by rebutting notion, advanced by historians like Richard Tuck, that equivalence between ius and dominium made by some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers amounts to the `origin' of modern subjective right in its most radical form . . . in which it is preeminently associated with liberty, with property, and with a certain idea of (p. 10).To be sure, some thirteenth-century writers, especially theologians associated with Franciscan Order, did make such an equation. St. Bonaventure and John Pecham, for instance, equated ius and dominium as part of a larger effort to understand freedom of will necessary to renounce goods of this world: Ius as much as dominium involved ability to claim in court (p. 18), and so violated spirit of humilitas required of every Friar Minor. But most medieval authors, Brett continues, did not make ius-*dominium equivalence a central part of their thought on freedom of individual. Brett brings this point home by reviewing works of Roman lawyers like Bartolus of Sassoferrato and authors of Summae confessorum of late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. She closes chapter by looking to writers of late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, such as Conrad Summenhart and John Mair, to conclude that analysis of the equivalence of dominium and ius . . . did not bequeath to scholastics of sixteenth century a language of ius as sovereignty or indifferent choice (p. 48). After refuting those who would see dominium-ius as origin of Western subjective rights talk, Brett turns her attention in next two chapters to role played by scholastic writers in shaping of Western rights vocabulary. The story she tells is compelling and important. She sees William of Ockham as playing a crucial role in development of this vocabulary, especially in philosophically rigorous definition he offered of ius as a potestas licita. She avoids pitfall of tracing Ockham's definition back to his nominalist and voluntarist roots, recognizing that practice of characterizing scholars' work as nominalist or realist and reading into such characterizations assumed commitments about right and justice has deeply distorted much older writing about history of subjective rights. Brett's intention is to take full account of the many intellectual strands that have come to shape early history of rights (p. 50). She thus considers contribution of such writers as Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif. She closes chapter with a discussion of Jean Gerson, who articulated a theory of rights as faculties or powers held or exercised in accord with right reason. Brett's treatment of Gerson is marred by her shortchanging possibility that Gerson was influenced by a tradition of rights discourse that extended back to twelfth-century decretists. …

After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford, which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy, the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of severe crisis and decline, which lasted throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Schmitt has stated that ‘the picture that emerges from a consideration of the philosophical and scientific culture of England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of a steady decline from the position held during the fourteenth century’, while Ashworth has concluded that ‘the intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century was somewhat sluggish … there seems to be no record of any original writing on logical subjects until the mid-sixteenth century’.

This paper presents a critical review of the historiographically dominant theory stating that the upper layer of the Lithuanian nobility formed its independent power only around the middle of the fifteenth century. The extant sources shed little light on the role of the nobility in the political processes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A complex of sources, more fully reflecting the specifics of the country, appeared only after the arrival of writing in Lithuania at the end of the fourteenth century. It was only in this period that the place of the nobles in the system of government became evident. Therefore, it is possible to speak about a distorted perspective, suggested by the early records. The paper presents a definition of the nobility and an analysis of the origin, composition and structure of the Lithuanian ruling elite in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Consequently it is possible to speak about the prerequisites of the rule of this social group and the duality of the power of the grand duke and the nobility. Two principal tendencies of the development of the Lithuanian nobility in the fifteenth century – personal continuity and internal transformation (family structure) – are distinguished.

The appearance of the local centres of glazed ware production in the Palaiologean Period allowed the development of local schools of parade table ware. In the Crimean Peninsula, the local production centres were active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Genoese castle of Cembalo, there were glazed ware workshops from the second half of the fourteenth to the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Along with the manufacture of various forms of original pottery, the artisans of these workshops copied the ornamental compositions which were popular in the Mediterranean area. This article addresses the vessels attributed to the so-called “imitations” or “counterfeits”, which reproduced the samples of the Byzantine glazed pottery of the group of Elaborate Incised Ware, so widespread in the region. Among these vessels, there possibly were the pieces produced in the same workshop or by the same artisan: small handleless cups with small flaring ring-base, bowls, and tureens or dishes with the so-called “aslant” ring-base typical of the Byzantine pottery from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The finds in question testify to the popularity of the Byzantine Elaborate Incised Ware in the Northern Black Sea Area, and the Genoese castle of Cembalo in particular, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

T he period of greatest commercial activity between England and Florence was probably the fourteenth century. However, at that time, although the influence of Florentine merchants in England was at its height, English and Florentine shipping played no part in the trade. It was not until after 142 I, when not only Pisa but also the ports of Porto Pisano and Leghorn had finally fallen into Florentine hands, that Florentine shipping began to appear in northern waters, and it was not until well into the second half of the century that English shipping made its presence felt in the Mediterranean.1 The importance which was generally attached to the sea route in AngloFlorentine trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the result of the great contrast between the costs of sea and land transport. Even with a luxury article such as silk the cost of sea transport from Venice to Flanders in the fourteenth century was one quarter of that of land transport.2 In the fifteenth century it is probable that the bulk of trade used the sea route, although there is some evidence that the contrast was not as great in particular instances as has sometimes been thought.3 The Florentine galleys, to which tariff concessions in Pisa secured much of the trade between 142i and 1465, were organized along the lines of the welltried Venetian system. From 1425 onwards fleets of two or three galleys sailed for the West each year in September.4 They called at several points around the western basin of the Mediterranean, usually touched on the west coast of the Iberian peninsular, and then headed straight for Sluys. After a long stop there they would appear in the English ports, usually Southampton or London, during the first quarter of the year.5 There they would load for forty or sixty

O urbanizmu Osora nakon 1450. godine

Obnova jadranskih gradova pod mletačkom vlašću obuhvatila je i sva centralna urbana naselja na Kvarnerskim otocima. Krajem 15. i tijekom 16. stoljeća Cres je dobio novi prsten zidina, kneževu palaču, gradsku ložu, gradski toranj sa satom nad lučkim vratima, fontik, zbornu crkvu te se proširio na područje srednjovjekovnog burga. Redizajn Krka provodio je mletački providur Vinciguerra krajem 15. stoljeća, a opsežni graditeljski pothvati zahvatili su i Rab. Osor, antička metropola Cresko-lošinjske otočne skupine, u tom se razdoblju radikalno smanjuje. Sredinom naselja, koje je od prapovijesti zauzimalo cjelokupnu površinu niske prevlake smještene između otoka Cresa i Lošinja, podignut je novi potez bedema kojim je grad prepolovljen. Istočna polovica naselja, u kojoj je smješten ranokršćanski katedralni kompleks, ostala je izvan bede-ma. Istočni bedem vremenom se urušava i razgrađuje, katedrala se reducira na središnji brod jedne od bazilika, a gradsko tkivo nestaje.

This paper is based on the records of manumissions of slaves found in the extant notarial deeds of Genoese and Venetian notaries working in Famagusta during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Subjects to be analysed and discussed are the following: the ethnic origins of the slaves, mainly Greeks but also Saracens, Slavonians, Bulgarians, Circassians and one Turkish female slave, the owners liberating them, chiefly Venetians and Genoese, but including some Eastern Christians, Cypriots and one Majorcan, as well as the reasons, if any, cited for freeing them, these usually being faithful service and the good of the owner’s soul. The last reason was cited more frequently during times of plague when mortality increased. The female to male ratio of the slaves freed, which fluctuated over time, will also be discussed. During the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries more female than male slaves were freed, but this proportion was reversed in the second half of the fourteenth century. Regarding the ages of slaves freed, they were unusually young in the recorded manumissions of the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, and even those freed in the fifteenth century were in their mid-to late twenties in the cases where their ages are recorded. What preconditions if any were attached to their liberation from servitude, will be examined, since these usually involved serving their former masters or their heirs for a fixed number of years. In addition, the reasons why there are only four extant acts of manumission from fifteenth century Famagusta will be discussed. The limitations of the sources at our disposal and the imbalances they present in terms of space, quantity and time will also be dealt with, for the picture they present regarding manumissions of slaves is an incomplete one. The subject will also be placed in a wider Mediterranean context. Comparisons with other areas of the Mediterranean will be made and I will discuss how political, military, economic and religious developments taking place in the Mediterranean influenced the manumission of slaves on Cyprus. The closure of the Black Sea in the mid-fifteenth century as a result of the Ottoman conquests for example drove up the price of slaves and helps explain the relatively few manumissions recorded on fifteenth century Cyprus.

Marbling and monochrome paint layers on the reverse of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century panel paintings have received little attention and are often poorly preserved. A link is suggested between painted marbling and oriental marbled paper. Marbled paper was first manufactured in China in the tenth century; it is reasonable to suppose that marbled papers were introduced into Europe long before the fifteenth century and that painters were aware of their use in the Persian and Arab worlds for writing, fine arts and administrative purposes. Similarities in use as well as in techniques support this hypothesis. Marbling on panel painting was intended for decorative effect rather than charged with symbolism. Reverses were also often painted in a monochrome paint layer. The favourite colour in the fourteenth century was red; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was black, probably in accordance with fashion at the Burgundian court. In the sixteenth century, the reverses of wings were sometimes painted in other colours. These monochrome paint layers often have texts with gilded letters. They are also often overpainted, for example with portraits of donors, sometimes added at a later date and after the painting had been moved to another location. Even marbling was occasionally overpainted with a coat-of-arms or the figure of a donor. Art historians should be aware of this possibility when assigning dates and attributions.