Das Phänomen der Martenehe in kontinentaleuropäischer, walisischer, bretonischer und anglonormannischer Literatur des Mittelalters

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

sion: a rejection of passion for a higher, spiritual love. And if Wood is right about Troilus, both establish a connection between the individual’s subver­ sion of reason by misdirected desire and the political ills of an entire society. Vox Clamantis serves Wood well, but not nearly as well as the Confessio might have done had he been a less cautious scholar. But the author warned the reader that the study is “introductory,” so he should not be seriously faulted for what he has not done. What he has done with considerable success is to reveal Chaucer’s skilful and coherent manage­ ment of the poem’s elements, suggesting at the same time a number of new critical directions which can profitably be pursued. donald f . chapin / University of Western Ontario Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). ix, 253. $20.00 Prolific of texts, barren of genius, the fifteenth century seems to promise little to those whose interests in poetry extend beyond the archival. But the fifteenth century led toward the sixteenth century as well as away from the fourteenth, and Poets and Princepleasers has much to offer those who are in any way interested in the progress of English literature after Chaucer. The English literary renaissance was not simply transplanted from Italy, and it has become increasingly clear in recent years that many of the more puzzling questions about the genesis of Elizabethan attitudes toward poetry will only be answered when we have a better understanding of late medieval attitudes. Such sixteenth-century studies as H. A. Mason’s Humanism and Poetry in the early Tudor Period and John Stevens’s Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court have suggested the need for a better understanding of the courtly context of late medieval literature — the suggestion is implicit, for example, in Mason’s provocative assertion that the study of Wyatt’s court lyrics belongs to sociology rather than to literature — but the textual focus of these studies precludes any detailed exploration of the ways in which the court served to promote and define literary activity. Poets and Prince­ pleasers, by reversing the direction of approach and starting not with the literary texts but with the structures and concerns of court society itself, provides a valuable complement to existing critical studies. The first half of the work is an impressive exercise in historical recon­ struction. Green’s concern here is “to convey some idea of the kind of house­ hold in and for which the late medieval poet worked” (100). To do this he 491 draws on a wide range of materials — court literature, chamber accounts, household ordinances, library inventories, records of seigneurial establish­ ments, chronicles, middle-class correspondence, and, where the English records leave parts of the canvas unfilled, the (probably) analogous prac­ tices of the French and Burgundian courts. What emerges from his account of the royal household — the familia regis, and its inner circle, the camera regis — is a portrait of a disciplined and at the same time highly competi­ tive society, one that was large enough to provide considerable variety of occupation and opportunity — by the 1470s the familia of Edward IV numbered about 600 — and one that was for most of its members virtually self-enclosed, a “complete environment” demanding an almost total commit­ ment. One’s place in the familia was determined largely by service and patron­ age — the twin realities underlying the conventional formulae of the “modesty topos” — and literacy was an important qualification, not only for the increasing number of laymen meeting the court’s clerical needs, but also for those who aspired to admission to the camera regis. The camera, com­ prising those who had daily contact with the king, was the cultural centre of the familia. For its members the writing of poetry was a fashionable though not an important activity, and it was often the recipient of literary (and other) work written either as a commission or for presentation. Letters, however, were more than matter for entertainment. By the late fourteenth century instruction in both “nouriture” and “lettrure” — the latter extending to...

Reviewed by: Teach Us to Pray: The Lord's Prayer, Catechesis, and Ritual Reform in the Sixteenth Century by Katharine Mahon Anna Marie Johnson Teach Us to Pray: The Lord's Prayer, Catechesis, and Ritual Reform in the Sixteenth Century. By Katharine Mahon. London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. 169 pp. Historical accounts often present the early church and the Reformation as high points of Christian formation, with the Middle Ages as a deep nadir. Katharine Mahon, in this revision of her Notre Dame dissertation, challenges that view by tracing the uses of the Lord's Prayer through the late Middle Ages and Reformation in catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer. Mahon identifies three effective touchpoints in the Reformation to gauge the changing uses of the prayer: Luther's catechetical works, the catechism in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and the 1566 catechism by Jesuit Peter Canisius. A cornerstone of Mahon's argument—and the distinct strength of this book—is her contention that medieval formation in the faith, far from being less rigorous than in other eras, was quite extensive and holistic. Mahon emphasizes that medieval Christian [End Page 97] formation was embedded within ritual systems and aimed to form Christians as ritual participants. Knowing the Lord's Prayer was a signifier of one's membership in the church and a means of formation as part of the ritual life of the church, especially in the sacrament of penance. Mahon traces a decisive shift from a late medieval emphasis on ritual to a Reformation emphasis on knowledge and understanding. In the Reformation, Mahon argues, the late medieval "unified ritual pattern" (11) of the Lord's Prayer across catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer was dissolved and replaced by a narrower emphasis on understanding the prayer's meaning through memorization and explanation. The last three chapters outline late medieval and Reformation usage of the Lord's Prayer in catechisms, liturgies, and instruction on private prayer. Mahon emphasizes that later authors encouraged readers to comprehend the prayer and to repeat it with earnest faith. At least within the catechisms, the function of the Lord's Prayer, she argues, became "a text … rather than a performance" (74). Mahon identifies the Protestant concept of faith as the rationale for this change. While she often takes pains to present Reformation-era changes in an ecumenical tone and to note continuity between late medieval and Reformation practices, her view of Protestant understandings of faith draws sharp lines and pushes distinctions too far. For example, she presents a Protestant view of faith as an arid, purely intellectual, and individualistic concept that makes the Lord's Prayer into "a piece of knowledge to be tested for accuracy and comprehension, alongside other pieces of knowledge," (73) which she contrasts sharply with medieval usage as "ritual communion, identification, or participation" (78). Elsewhere, she nuances this view, recognizing that reforms by Luther and others emphasized liturgical participation for the purposes of identification, formation, and faith (96). She also grants that, while Luther thought the liturgy should be comprehensible, he retained a belief that liturgy addresses worshipers beyond reason and can only be apprehended by faith (100). Despite these caveats, Mahon maintains that the Reformation fundamentally changed the use of the Lord's Prayer from ritual formation to knowledge. [End Page 98] For this reviewer, the sharp lines she draws between late medieval and Reformation-era use of the Lord's Prayer occlude more than they outline. In both the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Lord's Prayer was used to understand the faith, to move the heart towards strengthened faith, and to participate in communal and ritual Christian life. It is true that Reformation-era reformers wanted worshipers to understand what was happening in the worship service, and that they emphasized comprehension and memorization of the Lord's Prayer more than medieval teachers. Yet they, too, encouraged participation in worship for formation in a ritual community. While much changed in the Reformation, the purposes of the Lord's Prayer in catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer had more continuities than discontinuities with the late Middle Ages. In both eras, churches taught the Lord's Prayer to build up faith in...

Reviewed by: Initia Reformationis. Wittenberg und die Frühe Reformation ed. by Irene Dingel et al. Kurt K. Hendel Initia Reformationis. Wittenberg und die Frühe Reformation. Edited by Irene Dingel, Armin Kohnle, Stefan Rhein, and Ernst-Joachim Waschke. Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie, vol. 33. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017. 445 pp. This volume is a collection of lectures presented at the XII. Frühjahrstagung zur Wittenberger Reformation, which took place in Wittenberg from March 17–19, 2016. Seventeen essays are organized into three sections, exploring 1) the piety and criticism of the church in the high and late Middle Ages, 2) the broader sixteenth-century context within which the Reformation movement emerged and expanded, and 3) particular aspects of the movement during its early years. It is likely that most readers of Lutheran Quarterly will be interested primarily in the essays in the first and third sections, although the chapters in the second section may spark interest inasmuch as they examine topics that are less familiar and provide information about the social, political, economic, and natural worlds within which the Wittenberg reform movement developed. The following essays may be of particular interest. In a carefully researched and nuanced study, Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele examines the criticism of the church in the high and late Middle Ages and concludes that medieval ecclesiastical critiques were primarily a self-critique by clerical leaders who sought to strengthen the church by reforming obvious abuses. Preserving ecclesiastical unity was a clear priority and reforms were pursued, in part, in order to achieve this goal. At the same time, [End Page 331] some voices were deemed to be heretical and resulted in schisms. These more radical voices at times anticipated the perspectives of sixteenth-century reformers. Temporal rulers, burghers, and peasants also voiced critiques. Their objective, however, was not to strengthen the church but to achieve political, economic, and social goals that threatened the institutional church. Schäufele concludes that medieval critiques were not a direct and certainly not the only cause of the Reformation. The new theological perspectives of Luther were the ultimate cause. Volker Leppin addresses the persistent debate regarding the nature and place of Luther's so-called evangelical discovery or tower experience in light of Luther's own comments. Leppin argues that Luther's evangelical identity emerged gradually. Leppin insists further that Luther's mention of the cloaca as the place of his discovery must be understood metaphorically. The Reformer used cloaca in his writings as a scatological description of the corruption of the papacy and the world. His point was, therefore, that he discovered the gospel in the midst of the corruption that was apparent in church and world. There was, therefore, also no tower experience. Irene Dingel addresses the question "How Lutheran was the Wittenberg Reformation?" She examines the early Wittenberg reform movement and its leaders and notes that, while Luther was clearly the chief Wittenberg reformer whose theology and personality impacted his colleagues, those colleagues, particularly Philip Melanchthon, also developed and transformed Luther's theology and reform proposals. The Wittenberg theology was, therefore, quite diverse. Nevertheless, that diversity did not result in schisms. Divisions and the emergence of competing camps occurred during the second half of the sixteenth century. Those divisions, fostered by a diversity of perspectives, especially the differences between Luther's and Melanchthon's theologies, were also given an impetus by the religious colloquies of the 1540s and 1550s which compelled the theologians to articulate their convictions in precise and clear ways. This tended to exacerbate differences. The quest for precision and the divisions that resulted were the impetus for the confessionalization of Lutheranism during the second half of the sixteenth century. Thus, as one answers the question of the Lutheran nature of the Wittenberg Reformation, it is appropriate to claim that during [End Page 332] the first decades of the sixteenth century it was Lutheran in the sense that it was identified with and closely related to the person of Luther. However, it was not Lutheran in a confessional sense until the latter half of the Reformation century. The essays are primarily historical, rather than theological studies. Their scholarly nature...

Bold Walks in the Inner North: Melbourne Women’s Memoir after Jill Meagher

Although many historians have extensively discussed the agricultural history of Europe between the late Middle Ages and the modern era, this period of crucial changes has received less attention from archaeologists. In this paper, zooarchaeological evidence from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period is studied to investigate evidence for improvements in animal husbandry during the ‘long’ sixteenth century. The size and shape of the principal domestic animals (cattle, sheep, pig, and chicken) are explored through biometrical data and integrated with evidence of taxonomic frequencies, age-at-death, and sex ratios. Evidence from twelve English sites and nine Basque sites is compared. The results show that in England a remarkable size increase of animals occurred throughout the post-medieval period, with much of this improvement occurring in the sixteenth century. In the Basque Country, a slight improvement is attested only during the ‘long’ sixteenth century, while in the following centuries the size of the animals decreased, perhaps in relation to the economic crisis that affected the Iberian Peninsula for much of the seventeenth century. The nature and causes of these changes and the different scenarios characterizing the two countries are discussed with the aim of understanding the development of early modern farming and the foundations of the so-called Agricultural Revolution.

Lov og lovgivning i middelalderen. Nye studier av Magnus Lagabøtes landslov

During the last five thousand years, the original natural landscapes in the Netherlands have gradually been influenced and changed by agrarian ecosystems. At the present time we are at a stage in which the remains of these old ecosystems have become scarce. In the peripheral regions too, urbanisation has become so dominant that the last remnants of these premodern and site-specific ecosystems are about to disappear. Knowledge about how historical ecosystems work is important not only in an academic sense but also for integrated nature conservation with a sense of responsibility for the preservation of a diverse historical cultural landscape. Insight into the symbiotic relationship of local societies with the productive environments of their landscapes, as well as knowledge about small-scale adaptation to the potential of local ecosystems, are important for the sustainable quality of our lives.In the light of its genetic and spatial approach, historical geography is the appropriate discipline to provide insight into the development of site-specific, anthropogenic ecosystems. This historical geographical study aims to provide insight into the operation and development of agrarian ecosystems in different landscape environments. This process is described and charted for two regions in the Southwest of the present-day province of Drenthe for the period 1600-1850 on the basis of written sources and of the archive constituted by the landscape itself.In order to gain insight into the functional interaction between farming and the area of production, it is necessary to switch to the level of the village territory or marke , the smallest unit of administration and jurisdiction, which is also the administrative starting-point for research into the historical sources. A chorological and chronological approach has been adopted in order to gain insight at the local level into the interaction between a human group (culture) and its immediate surroundings (natural substratum).Besides the focus on the village territory, this study is also marked by an emphasis on the agrarian form of life. This gave form and content to the interaction between culture and nature. The 'style of farming' forms an integratory core concept in this field of tension. The concept is understood in this study as a derivation from the more general concept of 'form of farming'. Style of farming derives its specific significance from the ecological setting of a village territory and should be considered as a translation of a form of farming at the local level. The link between style of farming and local ecosystem is a thread running through the present study.This study comprises a collection of independent investigations of the cultivation of the edge of the peat moor in Koekange and the stream valley landscape of the Reest. Although there are hardly any differences in respect of the object and method of investigation, the two studies are not identical. In the case of Koekange, the choice of an object of study fell on a village territory that coincided with a parish. In this case the productive environment of the agrarian community thus coincided with an administrative unit. Thanks to the greater availability of serial sources, this coincidence enabled us to emphasise aspects concerning farm economics and demography. In this sense, Koekange can be characterised as a cultural ecological study in which the central question is how a local community has exploited its landscape area and how this environment has influenced the agrarian way of life.The emphasis in the Reest investigation is primarily on the consequences of the historical forms of exploitation on the soil in the context of a landscape consisting of a stream valley system. In the case of Zuidwolde, it was possible to link up with a field research into soil ecology.KoekangeTypologically, Koekange can be regarded as a case of peat moor border cultivation. This type of settlement is found in the Dutch-German lowland plain in the coastal areas and in the Pleistocene situated further inland. The latter category emerged in the Late Middle Ages and was cultivated in the original border territory between the stream valley and the peat moor. In Drenthe there are seventeen such roadside villages with plots on an incline that can be characterised as peat moor border cultivation.The present-day roadside village of Koekange is situated on the extreme south-western tip of the Drenthe Plateau. The cultivated area of Koekange coincided with the stream valley of the Koekanger Aa (Olde Aa) and the 'Echtener fene' at cut its course along the boulder clay ridge as far as the marken of Echten and Ruinen. The moorland has now virtually disappeared as the result of centuries of primarily agrarian exploitation. During the colonisation in 1275 the orientation of the first cultivators was on the valley of the Koekanger Aa and they used the upward slopes ( opgaanden ) from the stream to the peat moor as an axis of cultivation.In 1832 Koekange comprised forty-four plots on these upward slopes, varying in width from 60 to 120 metres and with a maximal length of 6 kilometres. When the church was founded in 1331, the village consisted of twenty Oldehoven from the first stage of colonisation and an unknown number of Nijehoven. The last phase of cultivation, in the early sixteenth century, ended with the establishment of the southernmost cluster of the village, the Lage Linthorst.The study of Koekange made it possible to demonstrate a clear connection between the specific content of the style of farming and the local ecosystem. Ever since the colonisation in the Late Middle Ages, this system was caught up in a constant process of change through human intervention. Vice versa, hydrographic changes and modifications in the soil ecology necessitated continual alterations in styles of farming.The decapitation of the Oude Aa by the construction of the medieval watercourse to Meppel had far-reaching consequences in the long run. The fact that the dynamic stream system with flooding and silt deposits no longer functioned eventually turned out to be disastrous for the greenland in the cultivated area. The middling bio-production in this rudimentary stream valley already obliged the people of Koekange to look for alternative meadows in the sixteenth century. To some extent these were found by buying up land alongside the Oude Aa to the south of Koekange. This made it possible to extend the area of production outside the actual area under cultivation.The quality of the marshlands deteriorated too. The regular cutting of peat and alternation with oats accelerated the depletion of the peat bog. In the plots outside the dyke this 'de-peating' eventually resulted in wet podzol soil with bare heath overgrowth that could only be used for extensive grazing by sheep and calves. In the plots inside the dyke the alternation with oats provided an alternative for the mediocre grass supply for a much longer period. All the same, this form of greenland improvement was still unable to prevent some lots from becoming bare heath pastures. Coppice wood cultivation offered an economic alternative for the low level of productivity of the enclosed fields. Nevertheless, this form of exploitation did not really contribute to an efficient utilisation of the nutritional cycle.The southern greenland outside the plots depreciated from the seventeenth century on as well. This was primarily due to inadequate drainage via the Hoogeveensche Vaart at times of increased flow. The limited availability of high quality catchment areas and common pastures forced the people of Koekange to keep cows. Within their limited conditions, this offered the best guarantee of rapid reproduction. Besides, the attempt to secure double production (dairy cattle and meat cattle) had the advantage of flexibility in unforeseen circumstances.Furthermore, sheep farming ensured a level of stability in the production of manure, in response to the availability of marsh heath and bare heath greenland.The ongoing deterioration of the greenland destabilised the fodder situation of the cattle. Winter feeding in particular came under pressure from unpredictable hay harvests. Although alternation with oats made it possible to spread the risk, in the long run this alternative did not provide a solid enough basis to keep up the cattle stock. Reduction of herd size, however, meant an attack on the fertility of the peat fields. Since there was no more room on the village territory for additional meadows, farmers had to seek compensatory greenland outside the village. In the course of the eighteenth century this led to a large-scale practice of renting hayfields in neighbouring villages and neighbourhoods. In addition, the people of Koekange used to pasture their herds in meadows in Overijssel during the summer months.Another negative development of the local ecosystem was a gradual drop in the surface level of the regular arable fields and increasing flooding from the fields behind them. Both phenomena were connected with the deterioration of the peat soil by drainage and soil cultivation or by peat cutting. A side-effect that also had considerable importance was the problem of the low level of porosity of the cultivated peat soil. This was due to the intrusion of amorphous humus, leading to the formation of black humus strata below the old peat layers on the sandy subsoil.The reaction to the flooding was in the first instance defensive. The oldest peat fields were abandoned as permanent land for cultivation and were only used as sheep pastures or as extensive arable land or hay fields, while other plots were reserved for forestry. The loss was made good by the construction of new peat fields in the land behind the cultivated plots. In the course of the eighteenth century the disused land was brought under cultivation again with a loamy sand substratum.Other measures were also called for to reduce the risk of a bad harvest on the wet peat fields. Buckwheat as a summer crop provided an alternative to avoid the risks of a wet winter. Moreover, this crop did not require such heavy manuring and its inclusion in the rotation of crops helped to combat weeds.At the end of the eighteenth century the stagnant marshy water in the area behind the peat fields became a problem. The constant reduction of the surface level had made the plots vulnerable to the peat water that ran off to the Koekanger Aa. The medieval structure of border drainage ditches was no longer sufficient to get rid of the acidic water without damage, so that a new system of ditches was required in the parts of the village that were most seriously threatened.Despite all these problems, grain cultivation in the interdependent system of the mixed farm was the only alternative for an efficient utilisation of the nutritional cycle. A significant proportion of the mineral surplus found its way to the peat fields. A large part of the farmlands were thus 'creamed off' to the benefit of a regular rye cultivation, which alternated with buckwheat in the eighteenth century. The deep litter house system played a crucial role in this creaming - off -economy. The peripheral situation of the southern peat bog meant that it could hardly play a part in the deep litter house system, while there was little or no room on the cultivated plots for more intensive grazing.The territory of the village of Koekange offered the farmers little room for intensification. With the switch to dairy farming at the end of the eighteenth century, they were forced to resort to the catchment hayfields alongside the Reest and the Meppelerdiep. Only after the construction of the Koekangerwijk in 1848, which meant an 'unlimited' supply of urban compost, was it possible for a more intensive cultivation to get underway within the boundaries of the village territory. This was concentrated on to bring the plots outside the dyke back under cultivation for the emergent dairy farming. This socio-ecological study of Koekange has demonstrated that the ecological setting of the village territory cannot be understood as a closed system that determined the content of the style of farming. The relatively favourable location close to the Hoogeveensche Vaart and the available catchment greenland offered a solution to the limited use that could be made of the actual village territory. The import of urban compost, long drives to remote summer pastures and the utilisation of hay fields outside the territory already constituted an alternative to the restrictions of the local ecosystem before 1800. This early and broad outward-looking orientation developed to become a typical characteristic of the style of farming in Koekange.Koekange is a good example of peat moor border cultivation where the ecological structure of the village territory was influenced by the historical system of farming. When colonisation started in the Late Middle Ages, the landscape was determined by two ecotopes. Most of it consisted of a continuous peat moor complex changing to peat bog at the stream. The differences in gradient between the valley of the Olde Aa (including the Koekanger Aa) and the Pleistocene border area were very gradual. As a result of the poor drainage of the border areas, an oligotrophic peat surface developed here that rose above the Pleistocene border zone to the village territory of Echten. In the stream valley a broad zone of marshy woods developed, interrupted near the actual bed of the stream by fluviatile sedge. When the land was issued in 1275, it was referred to as the 'Echtijger vene ofte bruyck' [Echten fen or brook]. This name, the oldest designation of the area, further emphasises the original preponderance of the ecotopes mentioned above. The first colonists settled on the border between peat moor and peat bog. This border zone provided the most favourable position for draining and for the establishment of a mixed farm. The peat moor was drained and prepared for moorland cultivation, while the woods in the valley of the peat bog were cleared and turned into meadowland and hayfields.Already by the seventeenth century the homogeneous peat landscape had been transformed into a varied cultivated landscape with a number of different forms of exploitation. This differentiated landscape continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century. The construction of the Koekangerwijk marked a turning-point in the landscape and ecology when the import of urban compost came within reach of every farm and a start could be made on bringing the impoverished enclosed fields back under cultivation.The 1:25,000 grid map of the topographical military map of around 1850 shows the exciting results of centuries of interaction between culture and nature. A highly varied landscape emerges with elongated lots with a great diversity of ecotopes and gradients in the plots of land extending for kilometres, apportioning the village territory into a cake with more than fifty slices. From East to West you passed through marshy heath and shifting sands, alternating with de-peated pools, that were sheltered from the marshy ryefields by coppice woods of alder and birch. Between the peat fields and the farmyards were extensive sheep pastures and hayfields. The farmyards with their vegetable gardens, milk wagons and orchards lay beneath a green umbrella of hundreds of tall oaks. In front of the farms were the enclosed fields in a mosaic of walled greenland, plots of coppice wood and oat fields, interspersed with grassland that had turned into bare heath. The area outside the dyke consisted of heath and bare greenland, with scattered de-peated pingo remains. So the original 'Egtinger broeck en vene' had become a highly variegated mosaic landscape with numerous transitions from small-scale use ecotopes separated by many hundreds of kilometres of border ditches and alder hedges.The Reest Valley landscapeThe second research area comprises the northern part of the valley landscape of the Reest in Drenthe. The Reest is the traditional border between the provinces of Drenthe and Overijssel. It is probably due to this function that its course has hardly changed over time. The Reest is one of the few small rivers in the Netherlands that is still more or less in its original state. The stream valley system has attracted renewed attention in recent years because of its designation as a nature reserve, part of the so-called Ecological Main Structure. The morene dam complex in Zuidwolde and Lutten and the Reest valley system on the southern side determines the main contours of the landscape in the Reest area. These structures were embedded in the extensive peat moor that was created in the Late Holocene in the sandy surface of the Oer Vecht that the winds had deposited.The morene dam complex consisted of a series of North/South ridges. Only the higher ridges in Zuidwolde and Lutten were suitable for settlement. The other ridges had become so flat during the second phase of the expansion of the land ice that they were covered with migrating peat moor during the last phase of the formation of the moorland. During its relatively brief history the Reest has developed to become a typical lowland stream with little drop and a very meandering course. Because of the pattern of emergent sandy mounds that follow its course, the valley is very narrow and in some in the middle of its course. the acidic marsh water gradually changed to a that was much in and valley of the Reest more or less the The of the stream was characterised by grass peat bog under oligotrophic from peat and small of the middle with of and of marsh and the was characterised by peat fields with and peat bog. the valley and the higher morene peat moorland was not the and The parts the development of a peat zone consisting of peat bog and peat The peat moor spread from these over the higher parts of the landscape. In the area between the of the Reest and the Aa of a peat bog developed on the loamy soil of the valley In this way the Reest and its sand deposits were gradually enclosed by an extensive of peat and a result of the of a little is about the of the research area in the time it is that the area became in the as the result of the formation of the peat and that colonisation did not the Middle administrative the part of the Reest valley in Drenthe consisted of the of Zuidwolde, and The part of the below Meppel has not been in the of in Zuidwolde in was low by the of Drenthe. The was concentrated in in the middle of their village on the low dam morene that rose metres above the flat peat moor an The on the of the Reest was to a few mounds of sand The position in the of Zuidwolde determined the of settlement and the of arable land down to the nineteenth century. In 1832 of the of land in the and the local consisted of heath and of soil. from a few scattered farms on the only the was suitable for and cultivation.In the of was from this in the also from Zuidwolde in of the ecological had peat moorland of with mounds of sand while the large of sand deposits on the of the Reest provided more for settlement and cultivation. These constituted the of for the core farms in the Late Middle Ages, where they developed to become or of The result was a series of five or running from East to the from the Reest to the into five areas of marke land on an upward Zuidwolde, the oldest farms in were situated along the valley their Moreover, they were situated in a more and position in the and the more marshy land offered for cultivation than the oligotrophic peat moorland in In the first of the seventeenth century consisted of running from East to differences in the agrarian styles of farming in the two were for these differences be primarily in the local ecosystems. In the last resort these the room for of the agrarian productive unit that can be regarded as an interdependent system of forms of agrarian exploitation. The for this research was the valley system of the Reest. A considerable part of Zuidwolde and all of were on the ecological of this valley under the historical of the mixed farm. were differences in the structure and of the landscape between the two the situation of Zuidwolde was that of a valley at the of the stream. only was the valley narrow but the of cultivation were also by the oligotrophic of the Reest and the valley These were much more favourable in so that the valley was to much more of a crucial function in the mixed second could be in the structure of the deposits of sand and the boulder clay The for settlement in Zuidwolde were in the of the stream by the of sand ridges that the of the were in the dam morene on the northern side that rose above the an of boulder This a peripheral position for the Reest valley in to its in the on the boulder clay situation in was the valley was by tall that on the northern side on the peat bog in the Pleistocene valley plain between the Oude Aa and the Reest. The orientation of the different ecotopes and the central position on the offered farms in favourable for integrated these in the environment had their on the pattern of and the spatial of the different marken or village Moreover, they were in the different styles of farming of the two In Zuidwolde there was a emphasis on a creaming - off - in which the extensive oligotrophic peat heath played a central The style of farming here had a while the of land by was as a typical form of In on the other the were much more favourable for the of an integrated style of farming with an efficient deep litter house this study we between the 'form of farming' and 'style of farming'. The two are used in the but our historical ecological approach to be made between them. A form of farming in this context can be as a number of of exploitation to the agrarian use of landscape ecotopes. This a of agrarian forms of use in to the different landscape ecotopes. In the seventeenth century such of exploitation were already on a and The of such forms of use in a style of farming was thus primarily determined by the of the local ecosystem. example of a of exploitation of this that was relatively integrated into local styles of farming in the early seventeenth century is the buckwheat As we in the case of Zuidwolde, the of this had important consequences for the quality and of the peat heath which in influenced the expansion of additional forms of exploitation such as grazing and peat of farming thus have a and that is to a specific cultural landscape complex such as the Drenthe with its border Style of farming is a question of how such of exploitation are in the limited of the local ecosystem in which a farm had to in the marke or village In there thus be considerable differences between the styles of farming of two neighbouring village the environments and from one in of and good example of a of this that had an on the style of farming is provided by the exploitation of the land outside the village of Zuidwolde and In the first this consisted of en vene' and peat while in the second it was In the exploitation of ecotopes was on and of the peat so that were for the crops in the oligotrophic peat soil of Zuidwolde this process was forced by cultivation so that peat buckwheat could be for a number of years in this the was so that it a few to before a new could be The peat moor was with sheep during the the peat bog of the and the process of in a much more the field grass system of the oat field culture offered an alternative to more intensive exploitation. The oat with a varying period of was here by a heavy use of urban This of cultivation, in which were to the of the was thus much In this sense the oat field cultivation can be regarded as a form between the peat culture and permanent crop cultivation on the basis of regular have already with the of on the style of farming and the way in which they were integrated into the other of the farm. It is important in this connection to that forms of exploitation eventually resulted in 'de-peating' and of the Pleistocene sand It be to the two with one in of a of and less Both forms of exploitation in and were a part of the exploitation complex of the Pleistocene sand landscape of the village territory of forms a between Zuidwolde and It is a area with a large number of different use ecotopes. the of all the landscape oligotrophic heath moor and peat a style of farming developed here virtually all of the of exploitation. the of was by creaming a buckwheat culture with sheep grazing and peat while the behind in the marshy was the oat Thanks to the favourable situation of a number of farms on the peat moor it was possible to peat moor cultivation on a limited to the system in the neighbouring peat moor border cultivation in Koekange. we is a of of exploitation that to the position of in the differences in ecological the research also that the geographical situation was important not only for the development of the style of farming but also for the and of the cultural landscape. the for farms in to in and out was of importance for the exploitation of and a rapid of the cultivation. The link by water with the economic of the gave the in an advantage over their in the peripheral village of in the the supply of urban compost offered the in an to out of their ecological This led before to the and cultivation of

Reviewed by: ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas Elise Wang ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. By Arvind Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. xiv+258 pp. £55. ISBN 978–1–4875–0246–1. There is no conversational partner quite like the Middle English poem Piers Plowman. Scholars have spent many fruitful years listening in on the dream vision’s generative, manic, and always partial dialogues with the major forces of the time: scholasticism, theories of the mind, book culture, and common law. It is part of the poem’s charm that, given enough attention, it can seem almost exclusively invested in any conversation for which the reader has an ear. Arvind Thomas’s new book adds canon (or church) law to this list and demonstrates that this conversation was exceptionally productive. The book starts from the position that Piers Plowman was a ‘co-producer’ (p. 6) of canon law, and that therefore the poem should be understood as part of this law’s interpretative tradition. This assertion is the book’s most exciting contribution. It diverges from the usual formulations of law and literature, in which either law provides a source for a literary text or a literary text uses scenes of the law for its own purposes; instead, Thomas argues that we ought to ‘reconceptualize poetry as productive of, not just derivative from’ the discourse of law (pp. 10–11). Thomas manages the ambition of this project by confining himself to the canon law of penance, aligning each chapter to a stage of penitential procedure, and focusing each chapter on just one or two passages of the poem. Rather than arguing for direct influence, he extracts related passages from canon law and the poem and collects them together, much as medieval readers were wont to do. The proof of this method lies in how productive it is. Chapter 1 addresses the failed confessions of Mede (Passus 3) and Contrition (B 20 and C 22). Thomas’s diligent comparison of Mede’s famous confession with the performative procedures for contrition shows that William Langland did not mean either character to seem contrite, and instead used them to criticize the way the sacrament was administered. Mede returns in Chapter 2, and Thomas uses his method to excavate the passage’s deliberation on usury across two different versions of the poem, B and C. In Chapters 3 and 4 Thomas unfolds Langland’s engagement with restitution and satisfaction, first with Covetise’s confession and then with the trial of Wrong. He traces law’s maturation from the ‘pastoral approach’ of the B version to the ‘judicial and canonistic’ (p. 124) attitude of the C version. Thomas finishes the book with a meditation on the most famous scene in Piers Plowman: Patience’s sermon and the tearing of the pardon. Such a wide-ranging study could have used a more argument-focused Conclusion to bring its many directions back into alignment. Thomas’s Epilogue eschews this work for an after-history of the ‘inevitable sundering of the ways shared by Piers Plowman and the legal treatises’ (p. 236), which successfully closes the issue but does not help the reader recover her feet. As Thomas points out, canonists shared with Langland an interest in methodology over norms, which made their collaboration a happy one. He grants both canonist and poet the ability to ‘invent’ (inventio) law in both senses—by finding [End Page 698] and by founding. Throughout, Thomas’s strength is that his analysis uses the same attitude his sources do: associative but scrupulous, imaginative but extractive. His readings, like theirs, are often unapologetically narrow, trusting the reader’s interest in the smallest of distinctions. Nonetheless, the book is conscientiously pedagogical, never leaving an obscure source unglossed, always directing the reader to the implications of the argument. As Thomas listens in on a conversation between Piers Plowman and canon law, he also engages with the poem in a lively one of his own, one that it is a pleasure to overhear. Elise Wang California State University, Fullerton Copyright © 2022 The Modern Humanities...

Reviews193 This tendency to misread the status of performance with dramatists like Beckett and Shepard, and even the slipperiness that plagues the terms "drama" and "performance" throughout the book, should not be overstressed: they may point as much to the difficulties involved in theorizing performance as they do to the book's unwillingness to define. It is probably true that contemporary drama is undergoing shifts that resemble those evident in performance theater (and in the work of individual performance artists like Carolee Schneeman and Rachel Rosenthal, or directors—like Akalaitis—who assume a deconstructive stance toward classic texts) even if Vanden Heuvel hasn't yet clarified the vocabulary for discussing this trend. That this book may finally be more secure with the subject of "Dramatizing Performance" than it is with the more vexed issue of "Performing Drama" does not invalidate its many achievements or the importance of the questions it raises. With Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance, Michael Vanden Heuvel has claimed a place among those theorists (Philip Auslander and Elinor Fuchs come to mind) who discuss the most challenging work in contemporary performance theater and who manage to engage theatrical issues that always seem to reside on the boundaries between disciplines. STANTON B. GARNER, JR. University of Tennessee, Knoxville Sandra Billington. Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 287. $79.00. Sandra Billington's book is set up in the same way that the "Yale dissertation" used to be set up in American graduate studies until about twenty years ago. After identifying a distinctive literary pattern, she traces it through several key texts, noting its permutation in each. In her case, the pattern is "the mock king pattern," and the texts are several Renaissance English plays, including some of the best known by Shakespeare, from the Henry Vl plays to The Tempest. This model for a comparative study of literature is exemplified by Thomas Greene's The Descent from Heaven and A. Bartlett Giammatti's The Earthly Paradise in the Renaissance Epic. Perhaps its best known representation in studies of English Renaissance drama is Howard Fclperin's Shakespearean Romance. Billington employs this classic critical model with admirable learning to illuminate her subject in some new ways. Though she knows C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy and refers to it several times, she avoids covering the same ground and brings fresh insight to several non-Shakespearean comedies, especially Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King (pp. 188- 96). Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra are an unusual group, to say the least, but Billington's reading makes sense of them as "festive tragedies" that borrow from the mock kings of winter festivals (Christmas, St. Stephens, Twelfth Night, Epiphany), though for reasons explained below I think she makes more of some plays' associations with court festivities than evidence permits. Angelo as a mock king presiding over a world of misrule is a fresh 194Comparative Drama approach to Measure for Measure, while Billington's observation that "Every leading character who arrives on [Caliban's] island, apart from Ferdinand, fancies himself a king" (p. 248) is a new idea convincingly elaborated. Moreover, Billington does more than find a changing pattern in certain texts: focusing on medieval folk custom, she notes how it changed with social and political changes in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After a brief introduction, Part I of the book (four chapters out of eleven total) details the extent to which mock kings and lords of misrule were associated with actual political disruption in the late Middle Ages and then lost that association in the sixteenth century. What is noteworthy about her argument here is that it relates directly to Stephen Greenblatt's proposition about political subversion and containment , l For Billington points out that political use of the folk custom declined as the centralized power of the Tudors gained in effectiveness, while at the same time the pattern of the folk custom became increasingly frequent and sophisticated in drama. To put Billington's argument in Greenblatt's terms, the Tudors successfully contained real subversion (i.e., real political disruption), and the evidence...

This article provides an overview of Italian urbanisation between 1000 and 2000, which may help in distinguishing the main phases of Italian economic history. In this millennium, three epochs can be singled out: from the tenth century to 1300-50; from 1300-50 to 1860-70; and from 1860-70 to 2000. While the first phase is characterised by slow progress and the third by massive urbanisation, the intermediate phase saw declining urbanisation. A strong connection exists, in these periods, between urbanisation and the productivity of the Italian economic system. By looking at Italian economic history from the perspective of urbanisation, we can draw a different picture from the one prevailing in recent literature on the subject. For a long time after the publication of Braudel's La Mediterranee , the view prevailed that the Italian economy enjoyed a high level of prosperity from the beginning of the so-called Commercial Revolution in the late Middle Ages until the end of the sixteenth century, and only lost its prominent position during the crisis of the seventeenth century. As С. M. Cipolla repeatedly argued, a country which had been rich at the beginning of the century had become poor and backward by its end.1 According to this view, a slow recovery only began from the eighteenth century onwards.2 This view (which dominated in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s) was followed by a 'revisionist' approach, which held that the Italian economy was able to adapt flexibly and maintain, during early-modern times, more or less the same level of wealth that it had enjoyed in the late Middle Ages.3 Italian economic trends were thus described as flat. Italy was richer than the other European economies in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, but became poorer when northern European economies began to advance rapidly from the sixteenth century on.

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Reviewed by: Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art by Roger S. Wieck Dianne Phillips Roger S. Wieck Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art New York: Morgan Library and Museum in association with Scala Art Publishers, 2014 79pages. Paperback. $14.95. This slender but rich volume reproduces in color the manuscript illuminations and explanatory labels that constituted an exhibition organized by Roger Wieck at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York in the summer of 2013. The exhibition included 59 manuscript illuminations ranging from the late twelfth through the sixteenth centuries and four illustrations from printed books of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Most of the images [End Page 228] were produced in northern Europe and date to the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Although the text that accompanies each illustration is very brief and directed to a general audience, the book provides a surprisingly comprehensive compendium of imagery relevant to the theology, liturgy, and spirituality of the Eucharist in the later middle ages. Unlike typical exhibition catalogues, it does not discuss artistic style and only rarely refers to patronage, instead focusing on the subject matter and religious meaning of the images. Given the parameters of the exhibition and the imagined audience, the single page of text introducing each of the six sections and the short descriptions (typically 8–10 lines of text) that accompany each illumination are clear and concise, although scholars of theology and liturgy will likely find them elementary and may object to Wieck’s use of “True” rather than “Real” Presence. The introduction to the exhibition provides a one-page explanation of the Eucharist and notes the important thirteenth-century events—the doctrine of transubstantiation articulated at Lateran IV and the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi—that prompted the efflorescence of eucharistic imagery in late medieval art. The six sections into which the illuminations are assigned demonstrate the range of the imagery. Section I, “Institution of the Eucharist,” includes representations of scriptural subjects pertinent to the Mass, especially the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, and the Crucifixion, as well as the devotional type of Christ as the Man of Sorrows and the allegorical image of the Mystic Winepress. Section II, “Celebration of the Mass,” includes illuminations that depict various moments in the Mass such as the elevation of the Host, the administration of Communion, and other less familiar images such as a c. 1520 altar card to be propped up against the back of the altar as an aid to the celebrant. Section III, “The Eucharist and the Old Testament,” focuses on typological images, including illustrations from the Speculum humanae salvationis and the Concordantiae caritatis. In Section IV, “Domestic Devotion to the Eucharist,” Wieck gathers illuminations that manifest what he characterizes as the late medieval desire for “ocular consumption” of the Eucharist as a substitute for infrequent reception. He asserts that annual reception of Communion by the laity was customary. However, annual reception was a minimum requirement prescribed at Lateran [End Page 229] IV, and recent scholars have suggested that urban laity received more frequently. In Section IV, the illuminations are all from books of Hours and include generic representations of the Mass and the exposition of the Eucharist in a tabernacle and monstrance, as well as a graphic devotional image whose close-up vertically-oriented view of the wound in Christ’s side that is placed beside the Imago pietatis is interpreted as an example of devotion to the lance wound as the site from which the Church was born, thus accounting for its vaginal appearance. Section V includes illuminations related to the Feast of Corpus Christi, the most dramatic of which is a panoramic cityscape of the Corpus Christi procession of Pope Paul III by the Renaissance artist, Giulio Clovio. In Section VI, “Eucharistic Miracles,” the illuminations date from the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and most represent the miraculous bleeding Host of Dijon given to Philip of Burgundy by Pope Eugenius IV in 1433. The introduction to this last section notes the increase in Eucharistic miracles in the late middle ages and their connection to the persecution of Jews. However, the illuminations throughout the...

We present a thematic set on pedoanthracological research. In this paper a comparative analysis of soil wood charcoal from calcareous grasslands and pollen from an alluvial sediment profile has been carried out to reconstruct the history of calcareous grassland habitats in the Franconian Jura. Seven tree and shrub species (groups) were recorded from soil charcoal. Charcoal from Pinus dominated all spectra, indicating open forests or even less intensively grazed grasslands, which is supported by findings of remains of Juniperus and Ligustrum. Charcoals from Fagus, Quercus and Abies, indicating more closed forests, were comparatively rare. AMS radiocarbon datings assigned the charcoals to the period of the Roman Empire, the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Times correlating with the peaks of microcharcoals in the sediment profile. Juniperus pollen was used as indicator of calcareous grasslands. Plantago lanceolata, Galium type, Apiaceae, Ranunculaceae and Ballota/ Galeopsis pollen-types were significantly correlated with the occurrence of Juniperus and identified as further indicators. Pinus was selected as an indicator for open forests. Pollen of all indicator species occurred throughout the pollen profile starting in the Iron Age. The main peak of grassland indicator species pollen types was in the high Middle Ages. Maxima of Pinus pollen have been recorded in the periods of the Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages. We suggest extension maxima of less intensively grazed calcareous grasslands during the Roman Empire period and during the late Middle Ages and of intensively grazed grasslands in the high Middle Ages in the latter case correlated to intensive mining activities north of the study region. Increase in Pinus and the conversion of open into woody grasslands in the late Middle Ages/beginning of Modern Times was triggered by the abandonment of arable farming due to the decline of human population caused by pest diseases.

By the sixteenth century, vessels from Gdansk had penetrated the Mediterranean and were voyaging eastwards to Crete and Venice. In their increasingly expansive role in the carrying trade, Gdansk ships can be compared to the ships of Dartmouth in England and of Brittany in France, which served as the backbone of the carrying trade in the north Atlantic during the late Middle Ages. There is not much evidence on the types of ships coming out of Poland during this period since the customs accounts simply labeled most vessels navis, or ship, although it was common for cogs to be so termed in customs documents. Only fourteen ships from Polish ports and all before 1400 were specifically designated as cogs, supposedly the typical Hanseatic vessel. Keywords: England; Gdansk ships; Hanseatic vessel; late middle ages; overseas customs accounts; Polish ships