Guda, a sinful woman: a multi-scalar portrait of a medieval scribe and illuminator

Reviewed by: Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel Ahuva Liberles Ephraim Kanarfogel. Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 260 pp. In his exciting new book, Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel tackles one of the greatest challenges for the religious leaders of the Jewish minority in Christian Europe—the mild but constant seepage of Jews into the arms of the Christian religion, by choice or under threats and coercion. Focusing on medieval northern Europe, this book presents the diverse rabbinic approaches to apostasy and shows how these approaches were translated into rabbinic decisions. Kanarfogel also identifies the complexity of rabbinic attitudes toward individuals who sought to rejoin the Jewish community after their conversion, and how these judgments were challenged and changed over the course of the Middle Ages and in different geographic areas. This book is the conclusive outcome of the author's many years of extensive research on this subject. As the author clarifies in his introduction, this is a book about the history of Halakhah as it relates to apostasy and reversion, rather than a book about medieval converts or conversion per se. At the same time, it reveals much about actual acts of conversion and medieval converts. Drawing on an extremely impressive corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts, many of which were previously unknown or had never been addressed, Brothers [End Page 164] from Afar examines the sources against the backdrop of the linguistic and legal context in which they were created. Throughout the monograph, the reader will find profound rabbinic discussions illuminating several aspects of the intricate religious identity of apostates. How was an apostate supposed to comprehend his or her religious affiliation according to Jewish law? Did he or she relinquish Judaism by undergoing baptism? It is important to distinguish between the social and economic distance that the Jewish community, according to its rabbinic leaders, was expected to maintain from apostates, and rabbinic expectations from the converts to continue to fulfill their obligations to their Jewish family regardless of their baptism and new religious affiliation. In this context, the act of religious immersion upon the return of a convert to the fold is justified as a communal necessity, to publicly demonstrate the return to the Jewish community, rather than as a religious requirement to overturn one's conversion. In the first chapter, "Assessing the Ashkenazi Context," Kanarfogel challenges the generally accepted thesis suggested by Jacob Katz in his work, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1961), that Rashi was the first to understand the talmudic principle that "A Jew remains a Jew even if he has sinned grievously" (ʾaf ʿal pi she-ḥataʾ Yisraʾel hu) as holding halakhic significance for the individual Jew who converted to Christianity, rather than merely as a general attitude. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Rashi's perception of apostates as still belonging, in most respects, to the Jewish people, was an approach embraced by most rabbinic adjudicators in medieval Ashkenaz. Even though earlier scholars acknowledged that some rabbinic authorities suggested apostates should undergo ritual immersion upon their return, this position was deemed to result from a desire on the part of lay Jews to gauge the sincerity of the apostate. It was also seen as an expectation that stemmed from popular culture and served to undo the convert's previous baptism (6–8). One of the goals of Brothers from Afar is to demonstrate that some rabbinic approaches were much closer to this view than was previously thought and that ritual immersion was indeed demanded by some rabbinic authorities. Kanarfogel asserts that mid-thirteenth-century northern French Tosafists prescribed immersion for apostates returning to Judaism, in contrast to earlier scholarly claims that apostates were encouraged to return to the Jewish community without being required to undergo any special ceremony or act. In chapter 2, "Establishing Boundaries: Immersion, Repentance, and Verification," Kanarfogel paints a rich picture of medieval rabbinic scholarship by examining dozens of medieval Hebrew manuscripts dealing with halakhic questions concerning converts and conversion, closely noting and revealing variations in the choice of words and shifts in the order...

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

Danielle Jacquart, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (eds), La scuola medica salernitana: gli autori e i testi, Florence, Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007, pp. xiv, 592, €68.00 (paperback 978-88-8450-232-2). - Volume 53 Issue 3

Reviewed by: The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages by Thomas Forrest Kelly Katherine Hindley scrolls, manuscript studies, drama, legal history, medieval Europe Thomas Forrest Kelly. The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 208 pp., fully illustrated in color. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-393-28503-1. In the standard, simplified narrative of book history, the codex replaced the scroll and is being replaced in turn by the e-book. However, just as the e-book seems unlikely to kill the codex any time soon, the codex did not eliminate the scroll. Although typical medieval examples work differently than ancient scrolls, opening vertically rather than horizontally, the form persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. As Thomas Forrest Kelly points out in The Role of the Scroll, it persists even now: the scrolling action of online reading recalls the continuous text of a scrollformat manuscript. Placing the scroll (Kelly's preferred term) at the center of his investigation of medieval manuscript culture reasserts the importance of this neglected form. Kelly's preface sets out two key goals for the book. First, he aims to provide "an exploration, a set of highlights of some of the most interesting scrolls in medieval history, [putting] them in the context of the people who made them, commissioned them, and used them" (xiii). Second, he aims to answer the question, "Why make a scroll when you could make a book?" (xiii). The primary focus is on manuscripts produced in medieval western Europe, although the introductory chapter has a broader geographical and chronological reach, discussing scrolls om Asia, A ica, and the ancient world. The rest of the book is divided into chapters according to possible reasons for making scrolls: those that grow, those that represent continuous space or time, those used for performance, those intended for private or secret use, and those used in the conduct of a ritual. As Kelly notes, more than one of these reasons might apply to any given manuscript. Each chapter consists primarily of short case studies of particular manuscripts or manuscript types that illustrate that chapter's key reason [End Page 343] for choosing a scroll over a codex. The manuscript discussions provide glimpses of life in medieval Europe: scrolls containing the recipe collection The Forme of Cury introduce information about spices and feasting, for instance, while scroll-format inventories of New Year's gifts received in Elizabethan England spark paragraphs on gift exchange at court. The book therefore serves as a series of windows onto medieval European culture. This is both positive and negative in terms of Kelly's goals. It provides a clear and lively impression of the range of areas in which scrolls were used and, for a nonspecialist reader, an engaging introduction to an unfamiliar period. However, it also moves the focus om form to text, meaning that the emphasis on why to choose a scroll can be lost. The general reasons Kelly proposes for making scrolls are useful, and it is clear om the wealth of examples he provides that these are categories into which many surviving scrolls fall. However, the book's goal of showcasing especially interesting and extraordinary examples of scrolls is to some extent contradictory to its goal of explaining why a scroll might be made, since any explanation for why scrolls were chosen over codices requires equal attention to the most typical of surviving examples. While the reader is given a very welcome introduction to the richness of the scroll form, the book's arguments about individual scrolls occasionally fail to differentiate between things a scroll can do, and things a scroll can do that a codex cannot. For example, scrolls are said to be appropriate for recipe collections "partly because [the scroll] can grow, and partly because it can be opened to the recipe wanted" (53). While the possibility of extending a scroll may be important in the choice of form, it is surely not realistic to suggest that a scroll can be more easily opened to the desired recipe than a codex. A similar...

What was life like in towns and cities in medieval Europe? How did people live, and why was it that some towns grew into major urban centres while others did not? After the year 1000, all across Europe urban life prospered as it had never done before. New towns emerged, and established towns and cities grew larger and became more powerful and dominant. During the later Middle Ages these towns and cities were the focus of religious, political, commercial and social activity; the places where power, profit, piety and people all came together. Urban life was indeed the making of medieval Europe. Drawing upon original research, as well as the work of medieval historians, urban archaeologists and historical geographers, Keith Lilley explores the close relationship that existed between the life of towns in the Middle Ages and the life within towns. Taking a fresh and challenging approach, this richly-illustrated book will be invaluable to anyone interested in medieval Europe. It focuses on important themes, including lordship, property, and townscape, and explores the processes which not only shaped the towns and cities of medieval Europe, but also the people who lived in them.

From emperors and queens to artists and world travelers, from popes and scholars to saints and heretics, Key Figures in Medieval Europe brings together in one volume the most important people who lived in medieval Europe between 500 and 1500. Gathered from the biographical entries from the on-going series, the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, these A-Z biographical entries discuss the lives of over 575 individuals who have had a historical impact in such areas as politics, religion, or the arts. Individuals from places such as medieval England, France, Germany, Iberia, Italy, and Scandinavia are included as well as those from the Jewish and Islamic worlds. A thematic outline is included that lists people not only by categories, but also by regions. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages website.

In the previous article, the author demonstrated the close relationship between bloodletting practices in medieval Europe and acupuncture in Traditional Chinese Medicine. This study aimed to explore how acupuncture-based treatment was applied in medieval Europe. The author hypothesizes that the physical stimulation of acupuncture points associated with bloodletting was one of the main methods of pain management at that time. The study examined the indications for phlebotomy as depicted in the original illustration from Practica Medicinalis written by the 15th-century Archbishop of Prague, Sigismundus Albicus, supplemented by two other European medieval medical manuscripts. A total of 76 distinct symptoms (corresponding to 25 bloodletting acupuncture points) from the Practica Medicinalis illustration were assembled into four groups: 1) Pain and inflammation symptoms; 2) Symptoms commonly associated with pain and inflammation; 3) General symptoms affecting various organs and functions; and 4) Conditions unrelated to pain or inflammation. Among the 76 symptoms and 25 acupuncture points, only nine symptoms and a single bloodletting point were not associated with the treatment of pain or inflammation. This suggests that acupuncture-based therapy was an effective method for managing pain and inflammation in the Middle Ages and that such treatment could still be valuable from a modern clinical perspective.

The article discusses the results of a technical study of a collection of medieval sword and dagger pommels owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with particular focus given to the probable use of the lost-wax technique to create them and the conclusion that they were most likely created in Europe due to the presence of Champleve enameling. A brief overview of medieval metalwork is presented, and the pommels and their creation are described in detail. The association of the pommels with the crusades is also commented on.

The Hussite movement is essential for understanding medieval Europe and the development of Western civilization. Matthew Spinka and Howard Kaminsky stand at the forefront of scholarship introducing this subject to the Anglophone world. Thomas A. Fudge argues their role in the religious historiography of late medieval Europe is a precursor to global medievalism. Combining commitment to the Christian faith with firm opposition to the Soviet-mandated Marxist-Communist ideology that dominated twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, Spinka strove to present Jan Hus as a medieval figure driven by religious devotion. Motivated by Jewish atheism and a modified form of Marxist analysis, Kaminsky rescued the medieval Hussites from oblivion and political agendas. Fudge explores biography, history, and historiography as an essential intellectual segue between medieval Hussites and modern scholarship. Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Medieval Hussites considers biography, evaluates the work of both historians, elaborates their methods, assesses their interpretations, and analyzes their historiographical significance for the study of Hussite history.

Literacy, reading, and writing in the medieval West

The prisons of the ancient world have disappeared. Those of late antiquity and medieval Europe have fallen into ruin, have been recycled into other uses, or have been preserved as museums, their varied history usually explained only in terms of modem concepts of penology. Like the buildings that once housed them, the sources for the early history of prisons are also lost, diverse, fragmentary, or otherwise difficult to interpret. The collaborative work of archaeologists, philologists, and historians has been required to illuminate the character of the Babylonian bit asiri and the “Great Prison” of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. For the prisons of ancient Athens, we must tum to the Greek oratorical literature and the writings of Plato. For the prisons of the ancient He brews, we must consult the central Jewish religious text, the Bible. And if we want properly to understand these and other ancient and medieval prisons, we must approach them from a broad cultural perspective.

Encompassing the work of historians, art-historians, and literary scholars, these essays explore how interrelated processes of communal inclusion and exclusion - articulated through institutions, discourses, performances, and artefacts - shaped the construction of individual and collective identities in medieval Europe.

‘On the Road Again’—a phrase from a well-known American country song by Willie Nelson—aptly portrays the lives of many medieval European kings, who spent much time in the saddle traversing their kingdoms. The kings of Medieval Germany from about 919 to 1200 and beyond, developed the most extensive, long-practised, and fully itinerant kingship in Medieval Europe. This chapter focuses on the German realm north of the Alps because it experienced a more constant royal presence and has been studied more broadly. Moreover, the imperial expeditions to Italy and the royal iter there has its own dynamic, and only after the mid twelfth century did the German Hohenstaufen kings begin to spend as much or more time in Italy than in Germany. The chapter demonstrates that the rulers from the Ottonian and early Salian dynasties travelled more frequently and extensively within the kingdom of Germany than did their successors. Keywords:Hohenstaufen kings; medieval Germany; Ottonian dynasty; Salian dynasty

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen Carrie Griffin (bio) Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, editors. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 94. Cambridge UP, 2015. 302pp. £67.00. In their prefatory remarks, the editors of this timely volume, Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, highlight the tendency among many medieval book historians to produce “tightly focused analyses of individual manuscripts or small groups of codices” (1), citing James Simpson’s critique that palaeographers and codicologists fail to translate their findings into “literary criticism and cultural history.” The collection they mastermind—The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches—successfully marks a move away from such tightly focused studies toward a reappraisal of manuscripts as “objects within the cultural world, where people interact with them in meaningful, readable ways” (2). The essays ask broad questions about book culture in later medieval Europe but significantly they are underpinned by those aspects of traditional manuscript studies, and this is the strength of the collection: there are no single case studies, and instead scholars use their intimate knowledge of manuscript production and use to make “broader interpretive claims about manuscript culture” (12). It is this philosophy (not a new idea, as acknowledged by the editors, but applied to medieval studies in pockets only) that drives the collection, informing the thirteen contributions and challenging, “gauntlet-like” the “entire field of medieval literary studies” (Kerby-Fulton 243). The essays gathered here are consistently strong, privileging theoretical assessments of questions around matters such as authorship, the manuscript-print nexus, circulation, archival practices, and miscellaneity, while (necessarily) retaining a strong foundation in close readings of the book; as such they are both provocative and informative. Some of the contributions suggest ways in which we might refocus our treatment of and relationship with the medieval book. Seth Lerer’s essay opens by looking at the complex relationship between manuscript and printed books, asserting that manuscripts were designed to be unique but that early printed books, for all their indebtedness to the manuscript, were never meant to pass as manuscripts. “Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the premodern book” (17–33) argues that early printed books and manuscripts did not exist simply to transmit authorial content but instead were [End Page 556] “shaped by the commercial, scribal, and social institutions of the time” (18). Lerer’s piece looks at how the medieval impulse to compile “shades into” compilation practices evident in early printed books, specifically in Sammelbände (19), examining also the various ways in which early printed books could be and indeed were transformed into unique objects. In “What is manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix” (34–59), Stephen G. Nichols suggests that we are too dependent, despite our technological sophistication, on “analog protocols developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (34) with respect to our attitudes to medieval manuscripts. He suggests that we can profitably consider them a “technology,” produced in “urban micro-cultures” requiring high levels of skill and interpretative acts that are visible on each page, rather than as irregular, artisanal, and idiosyncratic objects that require to be replaced by critical editions. “Manuscripts,” Nichols argues, “situate their texts in contemporary history” (36). Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “Organising manuscript and print: from compilatio compilation” (77–95) also studies a Sammelband, here in order to think through “the complex entanglement of print and manuscript . . . in the reading and writing cultures of late pre-modern England” (77). Several of the essays offer thought-provoking reassessments of commonly debated issues and cruxes in the field medieval book history. Erik Kwakkel, in “Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts” (60–76), is concerned with the kind of information that can be gleaned from the codex itself apart from in the words: the “data embedded in the physicality of the object itself” (60). His essay examines what looking beyond the textual content might teach us about the scribe, the relationship between that scribe and the reader, and the anticipated use for the volume, concluding that “book design may relate manuscripts to their milieu of production, readers, and manner of use...

Notes on Contributors