Herbes à vendre: les dits de l’Herberie de Rutebeuf et de ses continuateurs

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.Although its focus is on one level of the order of ministry, this book is a wide-ranging survey, encompassing analysis of canon law, liturgy, religious art and the political structures of the post-Carolingian period. Its geographic range is similarly diverse, covering the British Isles to Croatia.The contributors, mostly from American universities, explore the period they describe as the 'Central Middle Ages', meaning the period from the final collapse of the Carolingian Empire to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Their studies of episcopal power are situated in a range of social, political and religious changes which characterize Western Europe in this period, including the development of municipal governments and city states, the concomitant development of papal power, and the development of new orders and monastic rules.The editors locate their book in a recent historiographical context that has privileged the voices of women and minorities, voices silenced by hierarchies, including episcopal hierarchies. This book does not so much reassert a traditional focus on institutions and elites (although many of the chapters deal strictly with kings, emperors and noblemen

The ‘confessions of the flesh’ in the central Middle Ages: An expansion of Foucault’s reading in Histoire de la sexualité 1 (La volonté de savoir). This article expands Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) reading of the ‘confessions of the flesh’ in handbooks of penance written during the central Middle Ages in the first volume La volonté de savoir of his (current) four-volume series Histoire de la sexualité. After the posthumous publication of the fourth volume Les aveux de la chair (2018), in which Foucault takes his analysis of the historical foundations of confessional practices in the late 12th century to the first half of the 14th century even further back, to the ‘confessions of the flesh’ in the patristics of the 3rd to the 5th centuries, it has become sensible to illuminate Foucault’s condensed reading of confessional scripts in La volonté de savoir itself. This exposition pertinently applies to Foucault’s correct conclusion that sex was prioritised above all other ‘sins’, ‘vices’, and ‘transgressions’ in central Medieval confessional scripts; therefore, as he famously noted, becoming a ‘seismograph of subjectivity in Christian cultures’. Against this backdrop, it is considered how thinkers from the central Middle Ages themselves reflected on the sacramentalisation of confession after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 – since Foucault himself did not substantially elaborate on it. The reflections of three philosophers from the central Middle Ages on the relation between sex, confession and absolution are subsequently presented as an expansion of Foucault’s reading in La volonté de savoir. Firstly, Alan of Lille’s (d.1203) interpretation of the Summae confessorum in his Liber poenitentialis is revisited, concluding that Lille’s perspective was ‘hermeneutical’, in terms of his insistence that the confessor should adjust his interrogations according to seven Aristotelian topoi or detailed questions, designate the context in which the transgression occurred very thoroughly and ‘actively participate’ in the confessional act, rather than simply recording it. Lille’s ‘hermeneutical’ approach to confession is also reflected in Robert Grosseteste’s (ca.1168–1253) De modo confitendi et paenitentias iniungendi, in which a moderate phronetic approach allows for the full discretion of the confessor, rather than following the rigid prescriptions of the Summae confessorum only. Secondly, William of Auvergne’s (ca.1180–1249) contribution to the interpretation of the Summae confessorum in his Poenitentia is indicated in his utilitarian ethics, in which the interests of the ethical ‘other’ is related to the confessing ‘self’: even though matrimony is for Auvergne the only realm where the other’s interests are not necessarily compromised by sexual contact, several considerations regarding ‘improper sex’, precisely within matrimony, apply according to the relevant penitential guidelines. Thirdly, Paul of Hungary’s (ca.1180–1241) De confessione is considered in terms of his reflections on ‘paying sexual debt’, and on the relation between regulated sexual release and the legitimacy of sexual gratification, again within the context of matrimony.Contribution: This article contributes to Foucault-scholarship by elucidating and expanding Foucault’s condensed reading of 13th-century confessional scripts in La volonté de savoir, with reference to the relevant texts of Alan of Lille (d.1203), William of Auvergne (ca.1180–1249) and Paul of Hungary (ca.1180–1241).

Early Medieval EuropeVolume 17, Issue 3 p. 359-360 The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages – Edited by John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones SCOTT G. BRUCE, SCOTT G. BRUCE University of Colorado at BoulderSearch for more papers by this author SCOTT G. BRUCE, SCOTT G. BRUCE University of Colorado at BoulderSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 July 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2009.00281_9.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume17, Issue3August 2009Pages 359-360 RelatedInformation

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

Framing papal communication in the central Middle Ages

The medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries: This article confronts the widely published medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries by presenting a statistical analysis of the relatively low (measured against the Early and Central Middle Ages) frequency of sexual contact between monks and nuns, monks and monks, and nuns and nuns in 15th century England. C.H. Knudsen’s examination of the pastoral register of the bishop of Lincoln, William Alnwick, in the period from 1436 to 1449 is utilised to counter the common, yet profoundly modernist notion of the Late-Medieval ‘wayward nun’. Five idea-historical developments from the Early and Central Middle Ages are presented as a backdrop to this statistical analysis, showing that sexual encounters in monasteries in the Early to Central Middle Ages in the Latin West occurred more often than merely sporadic. Having defined medievalism as ‘post-Medieval ideological-reductionist and anachronistic reconstructions of the Middle Ages, whereby the Middle Ages is essentialised by one or more contingencies’, it becomes clear that the notion of ‘sexual regress in Late Medieval female monasteries’ with the image of the ‘wayward nun’ centralised therein, points to a form of medievalism: a single contingent aspect of Medieval female monasteries – the occurrence of sexual contact, however discreet – is used to present a fabricated totality of a complex socio-historical context. How complex this historical context indeed is, becomes apparent in Knudsen’s analysis of the bishop of Lincoln’s pastoral register during his 79 visits to 70 monasteries and interrogations of 217 nuns and 528 monks. Concluding that the ‘promiscuous monk’ was a far more general phenomenon than the ‘wayward nun’ in the Later Middle Ages, Knudsen’s analysis confirms that the Middle Ages is still as much a domain of research as it is a realm of fantasy today. The modernist fixation on the Late-Medieval ‘wayward nun’ is, for example, expressed in Heinrich Lossow’s (1843–1897) provocative painting Die Versündigung (ca.1880). It is argued that the ‘wayward nun’ in Lossow’s painting was a self-conscious attempt to escape from the impasse created by Victorian sexual repression: just as in every other 19th and early 20th century representation of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries, ‘she’ was nothing more than vulgar fiction.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This critique of the medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries overlaps with a variety of philosophical and theological disciplines, including Medieval philosophy, Medieval history, church history, patristics, philosophy of religion and sociology of religion. Whenever these proximate disciplines are impacted by niche Medieval research, it may hold implications that these disciplines could take note of.

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Where medieval Denmark and Scandinavia as a whole has often been seen as a cultural backwater that passively and belatedly received cultural and political impulses from Western Europe, Professor Michael H. Gelting and scholars inspired by him have shown that the intellectual, religious and political elite of Denmark actively participated in the renaissance and reformation of the central and later medieval period. This work has wide ramifications for understanding developments in medieval Europe, but so far the discussion has taken place only in Danish-language publications. This anthology brings the latest research in Danish medieval history to a wider audience and integrates it with contemporary international discussions of the making of the European middle ages. Contents: Introduction, Kerstin Hundahl and Lars Kjaer; Part I Religious Culture: The settlement of disputes by compromise according to some early Danish charters, Kim Esmark; Byzantinizing crucifixes in central medieval Denmark - how, when and why, Ebbe Nyborg; Motherhood as emotion and social practice: Mary and Anne as maternal models in medieval Iceland, Agnes S. Arnorsdottir; The Black Friars and the Black Death - effects of the plague on friars preachers in 14th-century northern Europe, Johnny Grandjean Gogsig Jokobsen. Part II Intellectual Culture: Contacts between Denmark and Flanders in the 11th and 12th centuries: the tiniest of evidence, Steffen Harpsoe; Banking on - and with - the Victorines: the strange case of Archbishop Eskil’s lost deposit, Mia Munster-Swendson; The transformation of the Danish language in the central Middle Ages - a case of Europeanization?, Niels Houlberg Hansen; Two journeys and one university: King Christian I and Queen Dorothea’s journeys to Rome and the foundation of the University of Copenhagen, Carsten Jahnke. Part III Legal Culture: The Church law of Scania on the consecration of churches and the appointment of parish priests - international canon law and that of Scania, Bertil Nilsson; Dating the laws of medieval Denmark - studies of the manuscripts of the Danish church laws, Per Andersen; Regional or central? Legislation and law in 13th-century Denmark, Helle Vogt; Border warfare between king and pope in late medieval Denmark: a case study of royal politics towards ecclesiastical benefices and papal provisions c. 1350-1525, Per Ingesman. Part IV Aristocratic and Court Culture: Apocalypse then? The First Crusade, traumas of war and Thomas de Marle, Thomas Kristian Heeboll-Holm; Rune, knives and Vikings: the Valdermarian kings and the Danish past in comparative perspective, Lars Kjaer; Placing blame and creating legitimacy: the implications of Rugish involvement in the struggle over the succession amidst the Danish Church strife c.1258-1260, Kerstin Hundahl; Index. (Less)

350 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe. By David Herlihy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 210; illustra­ tions, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. David Herlihy’s Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe is a small and focused study on the jobs undertaken by women throughout the whole of the Middle Ages and an examination of how and why this “women’s work” changed over the course of a thousand years. At the heart of Herlihy’s analysis is flax, silk, and especially wool, and the steps and skill with which this raw material was transformed into cloth. The author, through a careful examination of estate surveys, legal texts, and saints’ lives, uncovers a nearly forgotten institution, the gynaeceum, or textile workshop, which formed a significant institution in Western society from ancient times until the central Middle Ages. These workshops survived the period of the fall of Rome and appear to have been a standard feature of the most important estates controlled by great lay and ecclesiastical lords. The women who lived and labored within these shops were in charge of the entire process of cloth production. They carded and spun, and they wove, dyed, and embroidered the high-status material used for court garb, diplomatic gifts, ecclesiastical vestments, and altar cloths. Women’s central role in cloth production survived the urbanization and commercialization of the economy, which occurred in the central Middle Ages, and even continued after men began to enter into cloth-related trades. As Herlihy points out, however, during the course of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, the cloth industry was reorganized. Each step in the manufacturing of cloth became special­ ized and was increasingly undertaken within a household or work­ shop controlled by an entrepreneur; each fell under the control of guilds that excluded women; and participation in much of this process took greater capital than most women could command. As a result, women lost “their traditional importance as cloth producers” (p. 185). Herlihy’s discussion of the evolution of women’s participation in cloth making is convincing. Less satisfactory, however, is the author’s depiction of these gynaecea as the locus of some “Golden Age” of the working woman. The workshops that Herlihy so carefully traces were primarily staffed by women who were born into slavery or had been enslaved because of their crimes, and it is quite clear that many of these servile cloth workers served as prostitutes as well as weavers. These places must have been terrible, and their depiction by Herlihy as a central institution is sobering. Similarly, the author bemoans the technological innovations revolving around windmills and water mills, because these improved technologies supplanted women from their central role in milling grain by hand (p. 54). One could as easily look at this change as a technological leap that improved women’s lives a TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 351 hundredfold. Herlihy’s equating of women’s monopoly of certainjobs as a good thing similarly leads him to discuss, quite happily, the close and special association of women with the preparation of baths, the nursing of the sick, and magical powers. The hauling and heating of water, however, was backbreaking work, the nursing of the sick was a dangerous and low-status undertaking, and accusations of magic were often fatal. After women were eliminated from cloth making and a number of other trades, they labored on nonetheless—within their own homes, within the households of others, in the fields, and in wealthy women’s nurseries. This class of labor, however, because it cannot be construed as “productive,” is not part of Herlihy’s analysis. To understand women’s work, however, it is vital to come to grips with their daily labors as well as their participation in more organized enterprises. Robin Fleming Dr. Fleming is an assistant professor at Boston College. She is the author of Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991) and is currently working on towns in Anglo-Saxon England. Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England. By Heather Swanson. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Pp. xi+189; notes, bibliography, index. $39.95...

In a well-known article Karl Ferdinand Werner described eleventh-century Western Europe as ‘a world of princes’.1 By extension it was a world of principalities, for most of these princes claimed to rule over large tracts of territory; and as they sought to assert their hegemony over their lands, rulers naturally tried to define and control their borders. In general, provincial borders in medieval France have not received the attention they deserve from historians, for they dwindled in importance in the later Middle Ages with the growth of the French state. Yet these borders and borderlands are worth studying both for their own sake and for their place in the evolution of political frontiers in general. This article will consider one of the most powerful French principalities in the central Middle Ages, the duchy of Normandy.2

This chapter focuses on four interrelated themes: marriage; courtly love; gender options; and violence. It draws on textual examples from Anglo-Norman England as well as France and Occitania within linguistic rather than territorial or political boundaries. The chronological focus is primarily that of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when the new ideals of chivalry and courtly love are taking hold. The singular invention of Courtly Love might seem to represent the opposite of misogyny. Constructions of gender through laws, marriage customs, names, linguistic categories, restrictive work practices, scientific and religious theories and practices, architecture, art and literature serve, among other purposes, to ground power hierarchies and contain perceived threats of unruliness. The entertaining, subtle and educated elaboration of the Genesis creation stories by an Anglo-Norman cleric for the edification of a lay congregation exemplifies issues of considerable interest to the history of gender in the central Middle Ages.

Recent research suggests there is a large quantity of surviving evidence for the liturgical texts written at Canterbury Cathedral in the central Middle Ages. A provisional list of manuscripts containing material for occasional rites, such as Candlemas, Palm Sunday and the dedication of churches is given and the reasons for thinking they contain evidence for Canterbury liturgy are presented. Some examples are given to illustrate their potential as sources of evidence for architectural historians, including for the policies of individual bishops, the fabric of the Cathedral, and changes in the performance of the liturgy.

This chapter discusses the complementary role of elite and peasant demand in the central middle ages as the basis for economic growth throughout the Mediterranean, and indeed elsewhere. It compares Mediterranean trade in the central middle ages with that of the Roman Empire and of contemporary Flanders. The chapter then discusses how this contributes to a rethinking of the logic of the feudal economy as a whole, which, it is argued, was different from that of capitalism. The driving force of the feudal economy was the struggle over how much rent and tax peasantries had to pay to lords and the state, with a general tendency for peasant payments to lessen, unless dominant powers made specific efforts to reverse the process. This created a space for peasant demand to grow, and for the economy to grow with it.

Journal Article Charles L. H. Coulson. Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 441 Get access Coulson Charles L. H.. Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 441. Frederick C. Suppe Frederick C. Suppe Ball State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 5, December 2004, Pages 1621–1622, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.5.1621-a Published: 01 December 2004

This book recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. Three ministries are examined in detail—liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others—but they are prefaced by profiles of the monastic officers most often charged with their performances—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. This book challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called Golden Age of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries as effectively relegating nuns to complete dependency on priests’ sacramental care. This book shows instead that, throughout the central Middle Ages, many nuns in England continued to exercise primary control over the cura animarum of their consorors and others who sought their aid. Most innovative and essential to this study are the close paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses of the surviving liturgical books from women’s communities. When identified and then excavated to unearth the liturgical scripts and scribal productions they preserve, these books hold a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of nuns in England during the central Middle Ages. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that nuns performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.