Archaeology, Economy, and Society: England from the fifth to the fifteenth century

The history of women in Arabia is a relatively new and unexplored area of research and the place of women in Mecca (Makkah), Islam’s holiest city, is particularly shrouded in darkness. From the fifteenth century, however, there has been a stream of biographical works (tabaqat) that shed much light on the women of the city. This note turns scholarly attention on such fifteenth and sixteenth century works as Taqi al-Din al-Fassi’s (d. 1429) eight volumeAl-‘Iqd al-Thamin fi Tarikh al-Balad al-Amin, which dedicates a volume to women, in an effort to continue the scholarly appraisal of women’s lives in Muslim societies. Reading such important sources shows how women actively participated in the public life of the city, including its intellectual circles, contrary to Orientalist stereotypes. By exploring the multiple roles of Meccan women in the fifteenth century, the hope is to prompt further study of their significance and its historical implications.

The discussion on the legal power of documents generated by the researchers exploring the written culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invites for a more detailed analysis of the usage of a written document in the legal process, the chronology of its legal regulation, the document’s place in the system of evidence as well as its meaning in the legal consciousness of the nobles. The legal proceedings and rulings recorded in the judicial affairs books incorporated into the Lithuanian Metrica reveal the process when, with the development of the written culture and the increase of the demand for documents in the state’s internal affairs, the written document evolved into an independent and sound legal evidence in the judicial process. In the civil cases, primarily concerning the land ownership, the legal power of a written document was recognized already in the middle of the fifteenth century (although there was no peremptory requirement to present written documents in the judicial process), and approved by the extended edition of the First Statute of Lithuania. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the long-lived “colorful robes of justice” (the oath, the gesture, the placing of one’s cap) were replaced in the system of legal evidence by written documents which, from then on, were considered as more reliable evidence than a personal oath, and, in some cases, even a testimony. Eventually, this view found its place in the consciousness of the nobles who documented their transactions and used documents to solve legal conflicts. Moreover, in Lithuania, unlike in the Kingdom of Poland, the judges considered not only the public, but also the legitimate private documents as legal evidence of equal importance. Although, the hierarchy of legal evidence, that prioritized the documents was embedded only in the Second Statute of Lithuania (chapter IV article 52, entitled “On evidence and defense” (O dovodech i otvodech), the analysis of sources allows to decisively affirm that the main source of the aforementioned article was the practice of the courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

JOHN M. BOWERS, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 405. ISBN: 10:0-268-02202-x; 13:978-0-268-02202-0. $45. John Bowers's new book is destined to stir controversy and response. In an extensive and discursive argument richly supported by references to works and authors from the late fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, he explores the literary and cultural dynamics that elevated Chaucer and relegated Langland in literary history. Bowers's complex argument-alternately persuasive, speculative, and provocative-is rooted in the logical assumption that Chaucer read Langland and in the consequent premise that Chaucer reacted to Langland's style and politics in his own work, especially during the 1390s. Bowers contends that the Tales 'became Chaucer's last best chance for engaging with Langland's literary achievements and topical challenges while also rebelling against Langland's kind of literature.' Moreover, he contends, the 'entire Chaucer tradition would carry forward this burden of anxiety, repressed and neurotically expressed, into the fifteenth century'(3). Langland emerges as the 'black hole whose gravitational field consistently determined the shape and luminosity of the bright star Chaucer' (3). Because of its densely argued and consistently allusive exposition, this is a hard book adequately to summarize in a review. It begins with an extended introduction that serves as a prevenient summary of its project which is to analyze the forces that helped shape the 'dual posterities' (8) traceable in manuscript and print production of Langland's and Chaucer's works into the sixteenth century. Chapter 2, 'Beginnings,' posits that after 1360 England entered a period of relative isolationism that correlates with a growth of nationalism and interest in the English vernacular. Chaucer, connected to French courtly literature and its cultural antecedents, presented himself in his work as the 'sole English heir of European literature' (17); Langland, more and more distinctly concerned with a native English tradition 'did not even recognize the nature of the competition' (17). In the third chapter, 'Naming Names,' Bowers explores the multiple forces that created Chaucer's reputation, and obscured Langland's in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, paying particular attention to Lydgate's influence. Lydgate, Chaucer's self-styled literary heir, was well aware of the value of what Foucault terms the 'author function' and helped shape Chaucer the man into Chaucer the author in a time when Langland's identity and name fell into 'profound obscurity...after his work had outlasted his original coterie readership' (102). …

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were ones of momentous change in Europe. Out of the crises of feudalism arose the new nation-states. By the end of the period labor had taken precedence over bullion in the market, and the capitalist “world-system” had been born. In the fifteenth century the two subcontinents were inextricably linked within the Mediterranean economy, by virtue of the gold trade. The association of those called the Wangara with the interior gold trade of West Africa was one known in medieval times. The Wangara, then, were Malians who specialized in the management of long-distance commerce, and the growth of the West African gold trade was closely linked with the extension of the range of their activities. The commercial situation at Elmina in the late fifteenth century clearly presupposes the existence in its hinterland, first, of a well-developed gold extractive industry and, second, of a well-organized distributive trade.

Study of the technology of Turkish tiles and pottery during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reveals a complex of technical features. The variation, particularly in the technology of tile bodies in the fifteenth century, contrasts with the consistent use of an alkali‐lead frit and a slip layer for the Ottoman pottery of Iznik from about 1475 until the seventeenth century. This paper considers what the development of the ceramic technology in the fifteenth century reveals about the genesis of the Iznik pottery.

Reviewed by: Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender by Aileen A. Feng Tatiana Avesani Aileen A. Feng. Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender. University of Toronto Press, 2017. pp. 266. Aileen Feng's monograph is a reply to Virginia Cox and Chiara Ferrari's book Verso una storia di genere della letteratura italiana (2012), in which the authors "challenge the categorization of women's writing as separate from that of men, calling on scholars to account for gender in all its aspects: language use, how texts are circulated, how the relationship between the author and his/her readership is construed, and how gender is constructed in different genres of literature" (11). And, in fact, Writing Beloveds is an analysis of the different ways in which Petrarchism was used by men and women during the fifteenth and sixteenth century in order to address the growing number of learned women in Italian intellectual circles. Feng writes, "This book engages with three distinct fields – Petrarchism, the intellectual history of early modern women, and gender and women's studies – yet bridges them in a new way by revealing how humanist Petrarchism mediates gendered interactions" (7). In her introduction, Feng inserts her study between the two main scholarly trends that deal with Petrarchism, one that focuses on the poetical perspective and one that focuses on issues of social and political concern. Writing Beloveds seeks to be a synthesis of these two approaches to prove that Petrarch's poetry and political works were indeed gendered; and it seeks to answer how this feature influenced the way in which women were represented and represented themselves through the reuse of Petrarch's own tropes. The author substantiates her argument through the careful analysis of correspondence between men and women during the sixteenth century. Feng starts discussing Petrarchan love and political tropes in chapter 1. She describes, in great detail, the way in which Petrarch deals with the figure of the beloved and of the patron. Her aim, in doing so, is to show the ways in which the author negotiates his own position in relation to these two figures. Feng analyzes both the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Africa to explore these relationships. By looking carefully at these two texts, she points out how Petrarch was able to prove that his position as a poet is one of power and not of submission. Moreover, the author carefully draws a line between the language and the images used by Petrarch to show how he is able to renegotiate his position as a poet. In fact, she shows how Petrarch uses his [End Page 345] writings as the means to gain control of the relationship with his addressee. Feng identifies "intellectual masculinity" as the tool through which the poet is able to reach his purpose, underlining how to Petrarch, his relationship to his patron and his lover are the same. Indeed, she claims that it is his intellect and rationality, acquired through study and his gender, that have allowed him to come to this conclusion. In fact, it is through Petrarch's own perception of himself as both a man and a poet that he is able to avoid succumbing to either love or political subjugation, thus defining "intellectual masculinity." The rest of the chapters are built on the idea of Petrarch's poetry as concerned with issues of gender and politics. In chapter 2 Feng describes the epistolary exchange between men and women in the early-fifteenth century. Specifically, she analyzes the letters exchanged between Isotta Nogarola and Lauro Quirini, Cassandra Fedele and Bertuccio Lamberti, and Alessandra Scala and Angelo Poliziano. The author aims to show how female intellectuals were regarded in the fifteenth century by their male counterparts. The main aspect that she considers in this chapter is the literary model to which Italian intellectuals looked in their writings, and the way in which this model needed to be reconsidered when dealing with learned women. In fact, the model was mainly based on Cicero's political writings and it did not include or even consider women. However, as Feng points out, by the fifteenth century, Italian society had changed so much that it...

Summary Mediating Conflict in the Swiss Diets of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries The Helvetic Confederation developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a web of alliances between the most important urban and peasant republics (Orte) in the area of present‐day Switzerland. The only form of mediating conflicts laid down in the alliances was by tribunals of arbitration; but these were never recognised by all the Orte in the web of alliances and proved inadequate in the face of growing antagonisms and coalitions throughout the Confederacy. It became necessary to have recourse to political arrangements involving the interested parties. The forum for these arrangements was the Diets, meetings of deputies of all members of the Confederacy. These more or less represented the most important political forces. Difficulties arose only when there was no consensus in individual Orten and when the official deputies to the Diet represented only the magistrates (Obrigkeiten). In such cases it could happen, especially in matters of foreign policy, that individual groups went their own way and thwarted the decisions of the Diet. It usually took a long time to arrive at a consensus in the Diets because the deputies were bound by an ‘imperative mandate’ and the minority would mostly not accept the will of the majority. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries participation and the achievement of consensus were the conditions of joint action of the Helvetic Confederation.

In Middle English courtesy poetry of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, guidelines for courtly manners and mannerisms became more complex. In this article, I examine a variety of medieval manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These manuscripts preserve texts intended for a diverse and increasingly urban group of readers who are urged to cultivate proper manners and to develop a rhetorical, ethical, and literary awareness of their cultural heritage. My reading demonstrates that manners began to migrate towards the non-noble classes as early as the fifteenth century as a means of social mobility and as a component of urban, non-agrarian social norms.

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.

Journal Article A New Continental Source of a Fifteenth-Century English Mass Get access Fiona Shand Fiona Shand * *Magdalen College, Oxford University. Email: fiona.shand@magd.ox.ac.uk. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 88, Issue 3, August 2007, Pages 405–419, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcm005 Published: 01 August 2007

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

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. …

Many scholars have stressed the favor shown to the bastard sons of noblemen, particularly in the golden age of noble in the fifteenth century. This article examines the position of noble bastards in Southwest Germany, using the Zimmerische Chronik (written in the 1560s) and regional studies of counts and barons in Swabia and Franconia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The legal position of noble bastards in Germany was inferior to that in France, where bastards were presumed to inherit their father's noble status, or in Italy and Iberia, where illegitimate sons were often legitimated as heirs. Few German bastards established themselves as nobles, and their opportunities for secular and ecclesiastical careers were declining long before the Reformation. The causes were not so much religious or political factors as social factors, especially the German definition of nobility and the increasing lineage consciousness of German nobles.

Reviewed by: Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations ed. by Nicole R. Rice Alexandra Barratt Rice, Nicole R., ed., Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies,21), Turnhout, Brepols, 2013; hardback; pp. x, 278; 2 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €75.00, ISBN 9782503541020. This collection of eight essays considers various later Middle English devotional texts (mainly prose) and their uses and adaptations during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Part I, 'Continental Religious Women in English Practice', opens with Jennifer N. Brown on the fates, in manuscript and print, of three English translations of texts associated with Catherine of Siena: a letter from the head of the Grande Chartreuse, supporting her canonization, Raymond of Capua's life of the saint, and the Orchard of Syon. Michael G. Sargent unravels the complexities of the French and English textual traditions of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples âmes, and details the extraordinary story of the text's treatment in the twentieth century. Martha W. Driver considers John Audelay's verse prayer to St Birgitta of Sweden, found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, in its liturgical and devotional contexts. In Part II, 'Manuscript Compilation and the Adaptation of Religious Practice', Mary Agnes Edsall writes on the fifteenth-century Fyler Manuscript (San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 744), belonging to a family of merchants, and its antecedents. Nicole R. Rice describes Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q. D. 4 and Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii. 4. 9, fifteenth-century clerical collections of pastoralia, both containing copies of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost and The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost. Part III, 'Negotiating Orthodoxy: Revision, Circulation, Annotation', contains Moira Fitzgibbons on the 'interplay' (p. 182) between the early fifteenth-century Dives and Pauper and the late fourteenth-century Pore Caitif. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry write on Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 23, an anthology of texts of religious instruction with theologically mixed allegiances, which contains the unique copy of a 'radical' (p. 230) unedited sermon, possibly written for Wycliffite readers, on the nature of the Christian community. Margaret Connolly concludes with an essay on the book ownership and reading in the mid-sixteenth century of two generations of the Roberts family of Middlesex. They owned, and used, at least eight extant books which, Margaret Connolly suggests, were acquired following the dissolution of local monasteries. [End Page 274] This collection provides a useful cross-section of current work in this area, with a welcome emphasis on manuscript studies. Alexandra Barratt University of Waikato Copyright © 2017 Alexandra Barratt

Reviewed by: Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century Amanda J. Gerber Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2011) xii + 222 pp. Research about fifteenth-century literature has traditionally focused on the socio-political nature of writing during the tumultuous end of the Middle Ages. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry’s essay collection, Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, encourages its readers to look beyond this critical rut to note both the formalist and reformative aspects of fifteenth-century literature. Incorporating articles about authors such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Gayk and Tonry develop the critical field beyond its customary focus on John Lydgate and John Metham. While Lydgate and Metham remain ever-present throughout the book, the contributors make a conscious effort to broaden the scope of fifteenth-century literary studies, even extending the period to include John Skelton—whose poems cross well into the sixteenth century. This collection thus aspires both to integrate new texts into the fifteenth-century canon and to introduce new interpretive methods for analyzing them. Tonry’s introduction postulates that previous scholarship about fifteenth-century texts provides limited conclusions about a diverse and complex literary period. Initiating her discussion with Lydgate, Tonry acknowledges that most perceptions about this era are predicated on this one English monk. She then moves through the history of formalism studies, laying the groundwork for the book’s methodology. The first two essays explicitly pursue these formalist paradigms, looking at both readers and epistolary styles in relation to the material form of two fifteenth-century manuscripts. Jessica Brantley’s article, “Forms of Reading in the Book of Brome,” analyzes the appearance of the words on the page of the Book of Brome’s Abraham and Isaac play, relating the drama’s physical relationship to the context of the Brome manuscript in which it is found. Brantley argues that the rubricators’ marks for the Abraham and Isaac play indicate that it was intended for private readers well versed in typological exegesis. The next entry, Andrew Cole’s “The Style of Humanist Latin Letters at the University of Oxford: On Thomas Chaundler and the Epistolae Academicae Oxon. (Registrum F),” takes a more expansive approach to [End Page 197] fifteenth-century formalist criticism, attempting to redeem humanist Latin and to revise A. G. Rigg’s arbitrary delineation of 1422 as the end of the period. To elevate and lengthen Latin humanism, Cole suggests that the dullness trope, which modern criticism has discussed about fifteenth-century English vernacular poetry, was actually more pronounced in humanist Latin letters. Focusing particularly on the letters of Thomas Chaundler in the Epistolae Academicae Oxon., Cole argues that these works combined classicizing forms of expression with supplicating appeals in a manner more advanced than anything seen just a few decades before Chaundler wrote them. The next three studies address forms of devotion, beginning with Karen A. Winstead’s “Osbern Bokenham’s ‘englische boke’: Re-forming Holy Women.” Winstead compares Bokenham’s thirteen original saints’ lives, called Legends of Holy Women, to his version of Jacobus de Voraine’s Legenda aurea in order to illustrate how Bokenham revises his thinking about the efficacy of teaching and preaching. Winstead proposes that Bokenham’s altered convictions correspond with a larger group of thoughtful clergy who reevaluated their beliefs and the meaning of orthodox Christianity in response to Reginald Pecock’s heresy. Rather than reveal how devotional writers influence each other, Shannon Gayk’s essay analyzes John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine as a representative of the general tenants of fifteenth-century vernacular invention. Gayk’s “‘Ete this book’: Literary Consumption and Poetic Invention in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine” examines alimentary metaphors that were common in rhetorical texts to demonstrate how Capgrave collects exegetical, rhetorical, and poetic devices to note their limited value—thereby requiring readers to work to produce literary meaning. The last essay in this section about devotion, Rebecca Krug’s “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late-Medieval Readers,” juxtaposes literary conversations with Jesus from The Fifteen Oes, Margery Kempe’s Book, and the first English vernacular translation of the...