Istoria timpurie a unui oraș contemporan. Ghiriș-Sâncrai și Ghiriș în Evul Mediu până în zorii Epocii Premoderne

<i>The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives</i> <i>Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals</i>

In Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique et en Italie, we read: “In Gothic languages, Scandinavia was called Mannaheim, which means ‘country of men,’” and what the Latin of the sixth century has translated with vigor by these words: “the factory of the human race.”2 This extract, as an echo of Jordanes's vagina nationum, demonstrates the growing interest for Scandinavia in French intellectual life during the nineteenth century, and especially for Iceland, described by Chateaubriand as “the Norse historical archive.” Just as MacPherson's Ossian had at the end of the preceding century, the discovery of Ari Thorgilsson or Snorri Sturluson (“the Herodote of the North” for Chateaubriand) further opened a new field of research for French scholars.In fact, this field had been opened up from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu fantasized about a mythicized North as a homeland of freedom (in opposition to the South) and saw it not only as factory of mankind but as the “factory of instruments that break the iron forged in the South” (Montesquieu 1973, EL, XVIII:5; Mohnike 2016, 18; Davy 2010, 96–7). Reviving Montesquieu's historical approach, the French scholars of the nineteenth century saw the North as a well that drew its waters from many streams.Legal historians did not hesitate to tap into it (Sturmel 2002, 90–121; Audren and Halpérin 2013), testifying to their own curiosity, but more generally to the scientific interest of French lawyers and historians for Scandinavia. This was demonstrated when the academician Louis-Jean Koenigswarter wrote in 1853: “The ancient customs and laws of Scandinavia have real advantages for those who study the antiquities of European laws over the first written customs of the barbarians.”3 This interest of French historical, legal, or geographical sciences for Iceland is reflected also in the superlatives used to qualify the Nordic island. For Jean-Marie Pardessus, Professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, Iceland is, of all the parts of Northern Europe, “the most remarkable by its civilisation, its literature and its laws” (Pardessus 1834, 45). For Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, geographer and politician, the Icelandic nation “is one of most intelligent from all over the world,” and “no one is more faithful to its own traditions’ (Bory de St-Vincent and Lacroix 1840, 251–8). For Henri Prentout, Professor at the University of Caen, Iceland is “the most interesting country to have a picture of the Scandinavian society in [the] 9th century” (Prentout 1911, 206). Pardessus's judgment about Icelandic singularities reads as follows: I could say that Iceland is almost more Scandinavian than Norway, because alliances and invasions [that] came from Europe have quickly altered the pure Scandinavian race in Norway. . . . That is so true that historians who wanted to study mores, customs, laws, and Scandinavian literature have always focused on Iceland.4Such an affirmation by a French scholar in the middle of the nineteenth century is not surprising because the North had become the home of a myth a few centuries earlier, dating back perhaps to the reception in France of Olaus Magnus's Historia om de nordiska folken in the middle of the sixteenth century (Davy 2019, 12), or to Rudbeck's Atlantica sive Manheim, a work that so influenced Montesquieu and Chateaubriand (Wolfram 1990, 2) in its confusion of Plato's Atlantis story and Virgil's Ultima Thule, and which managed to trace the homeland of all civilizations back to Scandinavia (Anttila 2014, 245). Thus, what Xavier Marmier writes in the middle of the nineteenth century is significant: Beyond the Baltic Sea, we leave our science. A wall of fog hides the surroundings and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Spitzberg, Finland, and also Russia appear behind this wall with their imprecise forms and confuse themselves with our imagination. It is here our Thule; here is this country half fabulous and half historical of Ancients, this foggy kingdom whose customs we cannot identify and position with precision, and on which we are told so many strange things. (Marmier 1840, 95)In fact, since the beginning of the early modern period, Thule seemed to embody a sort of original sanctuary where the origins of peoples and of their laws could be found, the birthplace of the world. Why should it not, therefore, also be the fons et origo of the homo juridicus? Certainly, French scholars were not unanimous in assimilating Thule to Iceland. But such an assimilation was often made by many of them, and it contributed to this mythical approach and the quest for the origins of Europe's nations there.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Pinkerton reminded everyone that famous and talented scholars had based their research on the “imaginary hypothesis” of a Scythian migration from Scandinavia outwards. In their minds, he says, the language, mythology, and morals of the Scythes had been preserved in the “Icelandic desert” intact, such that the Scythian advance through Scandinavia has become “a very curious object of study” (Pinkerton 1804, 247). A few years later, in 1822, Fabre d'Olivet believed that he had located the source for the first Mexican legislators in the Atlantis, and in the Borean race, “whose peregrinations have led it from Iceland to America” (Fabre d'Olivet 1822, 188). The belief was repeated by the jurist Ernest Glasson at the end of the same century (1889, 12). Here, we find ourselves on the threshold of a larger Indo-European perspective, amply exploited since the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malte-Brun, for example, who envisaged “one great family from the banks of the Ganges River to the shores of Iceland” (Malte-Brun 1828, 400), but also by Frédéric Eichhoff (1853, 11–2) and Adolphe Pictet (1859, 3).Furthermore, since the days of Montesquieu, there was no doubting that the North had been, long ago, a country of freedom. This was an idea that became widespread through to the end of the nineteenth century. Ernest Nys (the famous Belgian promoter of the study of international law), for example, envisaged the Far North as “the liberty's servant and defensor which fought for the independence of men versus despotism” (Nys 1896, 125). Iceland embodies this topos through the memory of the Norse migrations, Norsemen being forced to flee the tyranny of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr inn hárfagri) at the end of the ninth century. Land of freedom, founded on an anti-monarchical legacy, Iceland is also described as the land of equality, that being, as Henri Prentout pointed out, a dominant trait in old Scandinavian society (1911, 206).Following in the footsteps of Paul-Henri Mallet, who called Iceland “the Athens of the Ice,” several French historians in the nineteenth century presented Scandinavia as the “paragon of democracy.” “Common misfortune had brought them together,” wrote Georges Depping, “all equal, and no one could impose their own domination on others.” And, after enumerating the powers of the assemblies and the “lavmand” (i.e., lawman, lögmaðr/lögsögumaðr, who presided over the Althing), he added: Here was the simple and democratic government of this small Free State, separated from Europe by the boreal seas, and seated between the rocks, volcanoes, and ices of Iceland.5Various scholars made the small step that transformed Iceland into the antecedent of the Parliamentary system. Charles Hertz saw medieval Iceland as a Parliamentary republic (1879, 336); Gabriel Gravier located Iceland as the origin of Parliaments (1887, 171); Joseph-Louis Ortolan attributed a Norse origin to the word “Republic” (1831, 373); and Ernest Nys depicted Iceland as the “mother of England and grand-mother of United-States” (1896, 100).All these historical and legal reflections attest to the evidence of a relationship woven in fantasy between Iceland and the French scholarly world from the end of the eighteenth century until the end of the following century. There are therefore questions to be asked about the stance of French legal historians in that period toward Iceland, and about what it meant. On the one hand, it allowed them to renew their approach to their indigenous legal culture by locating in unknown (or hitherto ignored) sources the origins of their own national law elsewhere than in Roman law or in those law-codes that they termed “barbarian.” On the other hand, this allowed them to retain the notion of a civil law-code whilst avoiding the risk of an ever more perilous “Germanism.” When it comes to meaning, the use of Icelandic sources gave to many of these scholars of a liberal disposition (almost all of them from 1830s to 1840s) a sort of historical base from which their own political opinions could flourish.It even gave birth to a “Norse school” in French universities, a “school of legal history with a Scandinavian wing.” This school focused, on the one hand, on discovering (or rediscovering) Icelandic sources of law (see section I below) and, on other hand, on modeling those sources as a way to discover the distant origins of French law (see section II below).At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Noël de la Morinière, interested in Scandinavian antiquities in Normandy, admitted to the widespread contemporary ignorance of Norse texts: “They are not familiar to French people,” he said. “These documents seem to us like as Boreal forests which we only know from the sea littoral but in whose milieu we dare not penetrate” (Morinière 1799, 28). And when Domenico Alberto Azuni, a Sardinian jurist summoned to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte, published his treaty on maritime law in 1810, he managed to ignore Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and, of course, Icelandic laws. When Jean-Marie Pardessus presented his monumental Collection des lois maritimes in the Themis review of 1823, he disregarded Scandinavian laws on the subject before the fifteenth century. In 1839, Édouard Laboulaye, member of Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and Professor at the Collège de France, wondered out loud: ‘Who knows the name of Gragàs [sic], that curious law-code of the Icelanders?’ (Laboulaye 1839, 49). So we need to step back and review how the interest of French scholars in Icelandic sources took shape.The corpus of old Icelandic texts in France became known less through the writings of the early French pioneers of Icelandic studies in the seventeenth century (Isaac de La Peyrère or La Martinière) than through the authors of the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Des Roches de Parthenay and Paul-Henri Mallet. The former, with a presentation of the Edda and a few sagas, such as the Eiríkr saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), in his Histoire du Dannemarc (1730), showed how French intellectuals begin to become acquainted with the wealth of this hitherto unknown culture (Des Roches de Parthenay 1730, lii–lviii). Mallet rooted the Icelandic medieval corpus within the domain of European learning. Mallet analyzed the Edda, used the sagas and the Grágás, and joined together the three elements of the poetic, narrative, and legal triptych in Icelandic patrimony (1755). For this Swiss scholar, these sources are the tabernacle of an immemorial culture (Davy 2022). A century later, Frédéric Eichhoff, a linguist and philologist, after translating Völuspá (sometimes called a “mythological code of the old Scandinavians” [Cordier de Launay de Valéri 1806, 168]), wrote as follows: How not to recognize in [this patrimony] the vigorous and true picture of the ancient Scandinavia's beliefs, the same as that in the Germania, the same as that across barbarian Europe before the Middle Ages; these latter fade into obscurity before the Gospel light, cast like a late spine-chilling gleam on the frozen rocks of Iceland?6Mallet and Eichhoff both follow in the path of Giambattista Vico and his hope that poetry and myths will help to unravel the mystery of ancient cultures (Gianturco 1977, 93–4). The philological development of fables and legends becomes a “literal mime of history,” and the mythological corpus becomes “its articulated discourse” (Schefer 1977, 172). In French universities, the reading of Vico offered a challenge to the exegetic school that gradually influenced the small band of legal historians such as Lerminier, Klimrath, or Laferrière (Audren and Halpérin 2001, 4). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of Vico's New Science opened up two lines of thought.On the one hand, we know how, via Vico and through Mallet, the members of the Coppet group draw inspiration from Icelandic poetry for their own approach to liberalism. For Germaine de Staël, to take an example of someone whose influence on the destiny of legal history in France remained important during the first half of the nineteenth century (Gaudemet 1998, 109), the North seemed “naturally metaphysic” and a national “soul,” a “genius,” and a “spirit.” These are the lessons that she derived from the Icelandic sources that she discovered through her reading of Mallet (Berthier 1977, 206). With Mallet, as Sismondi repeated in 1807, the study of Scandinavian customs, laws, religion, and liberty became paramount, “not only for Scandinavian peoples, but for all Europeans too” (Sismondi 1807, 17). This would have notable consequences on the works of some French jurists such as Henri Klimrath (Audren 2006, 123). And, at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Ginoulhiac, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, affirmed nothing less when he wrote that “because German and Frankish peoples, as Gauls before them, kept, in their own poetry or their songs, the memory of the important events of their founders, it is hardly surprising that they should preserve by that same route the legislation that they adopted” (Ginoulhiac 1884, 151). In other words, for many lawmen or historians of the French nineteenth century, Icelandic poetry was the to discovering the of old the other hand, the texts were also a source for ancient famous and that Icelandic legal were to the democratic de la These to Klimrath, as a of the legal Frédéric de at the sagas in the same In his they are the of the Scandinavian first For some jurists in the nineteenth century who the origins of French laws, the sagas which Iceland has a were fables and that a that allowed one to For them, this was no an and their about the legal an behind which was to human destiny through to discover the origins of through the of and also and In at the Faculty of Law in Paris and the of in the ancient that he would take the most ancient texts of barbarian by to the Edda and the saga on which Jean-Marie Pardessus that the wrote “a that the civil and political of his A few later, would a of this famous saga on two Danish and as “the true picture of ancient Scandinavian de la 1896, to in his about the in French law from sagas were written they us with on the law of Scandinavian peoples because they ancient customs (1879, These French scholars did not the about the of the texts on which they those of Mallet, who on the of between and in sagas because of their for the and fabulous or those of who that no one should ignore the that the sagas are of On the many French jurists of the period wanted to the between sagas and and to name but a Grágás, the of which was by in of to have remained unknown during a of the to be used in French historical in the of the nineteenth century. Pardessus, who in with the Danish of the that of the sagas would we had the our very A of for de la a sort of of to the French for (1879, the could not, be as laws or to Pardessus, because the had not been (Pardessus such many French jurists of the nineteenth century this as a of “the most ancient Scandinavian as Koenigswarter it 188). For the in his at the Faculty of Law of Paris in of all the old laws, the Icelandic customs most For the is the Scandinavian most ancient For at the Collège de the only to the century, but it a law So it becomes to the as the of ancient customs, which is how the legal and Henri would it in the first of the century the late of the was not as because jurists and historians had in the by sources that to the laws before the century Pardessus and or because one had to the of an by the of the that it into Scandinavian laws could not the whilst “the most laws in of their of are the in of their other words, the philological of discovering a corpus of texts that had been hitherto had a of when it came to Iceland, a that European nations were to at is what Ernest Nys Icelandic our and life is based on that most the of This them with remarkable which a to the modern world. It is to them, that we on the subject of the most interesting of the Scandinavian the Norsemen the some of the first It is to them that we to know so many about customs, and was and it was with those Icelandic sources in that a of the French legal was the half of the nineteenth century, In Scandinavia we find the ancient Germania, the morals and that had no by the of and they have been altered or through this the simple did French jurists and historians discover through their interest in old Icelandic the first many legal historians of the period a of history that the as the barbarian invasions of the century. The origins them, perhaps more Gothic than of all these peoples from a of the North as a of as Koenigswarter it It was from ancient Ortolan that “the old us the of Gothic who to other their own (1831, 45). This approach both of that of late and that of the reflected that in the middle of the century. here the approach of a of history that several French such as to “In the and sixth Scandinavian was the same as that of the who not to the great wrote Ernest the national of the the when they focused on ancient laws, many French legal historians on through what medieval Scandinavian sources to For the law of Scandinavian the with law as by In de was to the notion that Scandinavian law and what and us about and barbarian laws in the century” between what the legal historians about old barbarian laws and what they about ancient Scandinavian laws is Louis-Jean Koenigswarter pointed out, what had been on the of ignorance was by some research on ancient Scandinavian laws, which have been to have with the and customs of German peoples, hitherto described by the modern world as when they on the historical on the of this legal many authors Icelandic sagas as a way to ancient barbarian laws The of Frédéric de on this is “The law-code was not a of barbarian laws but the of customs, as not only in Icelandic and the and the but also in the and the Scandinavian sources could be a to old Europeans laws. This was one of the lessons in the works of the academician on medieval The study of the history of Scandinavian law and customs one of the sources from which modern Icelandic and the Grágás, us the example in modern that had not been transformed by and the Edda, that great whose is a the the and its us back to the customs, the and the through which we in the and of our Middle the until the end of the nineteenth century, French scholars barbarian laws in the of Icelandic texts For the French the to that of ancient Scandinavian it is they take with the So that in the have a Nordic origin in the word in Icelandic law one that in the of Montesquieu, the origins of many French scholars in the nineteenth century, Iceland as the sanctuary of the culture of that an ancient brought together “the from a The discovery of legal Icelandic sources through that Koenigswarter into his history of French law as a of its origins a in the of our ancient and allowed modern legal to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish us of some new to they will help us to the study of the of laws in their and to approach to Icelandic one which “the of the old was not, its at the University of it as he that the study of Icelandic law in the century the interest of an ancient and based on the of but not influenced by the and very to the other Norse laws of the years earlier, Louis-Jean Koenigswarter had also written that the Scandinavian race is nothing than the race in its ancient is But he that the myths and of ancient Scandinavia could on antiquities than the barbarian laws written in Latin and influenced by the 4). he “one on which all European scholars is that they the customs, religion, and law from Scandinavian and cast on the between religion, customs, and law in both French ancient Icelandic law was because of its to and Roman in to the laws, which all from the of the on them the pointed out, the laws written during the century cannot an idea of laws because and had the life and of the Roman Thus, Icelandic it became to study old laws in their original forms Norse culture was therefore in to a medieval Europe after had been to the political and legal of And it was a of by their very the most of scholars many to for the origins of European laws in Icelandic That is what a of law at the University of in his study of French law The old Scandinavian documents are the most important source of the legal That is not only because they are and more than other but also because they are written in the through which to us added: The first them, that is to say those of Iceland, law to us in its and from for the of Icelandic law-codes was historical and geographical which many scholars pointed to the and de it is to their boreal that the the of their national de Ganges presented in the Grágás, the and academician to us a hitherto the world In his in at the Faculty of Law in Paris, seemed in his affirmation that on the were the of the influence of the on ancient On the many French jurists in Iceland an original and legal In that they an that a to and history in the of ancient law 2001, 17). pointed out, the was an original code that had not been by It is a law from all repeated a national law-code to Laferrière This was the of French legal historians in the and For Louis-Jean law remained to Norse and only Scandinavia many centuries after other European peoples had been to Iceland into a Scandinavian Iceland That is where there are the most of Norse and Norse Icelandic laws, as we them, are not than those of Sweden, or Norway, but they are more by the of the ancient de la culture had been altered in or Sweden, their own customs and their intact, writes Eichhoff (1853, used by French scholars in the nineteenth century to attest the original of Icelandic law-codes was to on the in which they had been preserved over many barbarian laws transformed by out Icelandic law has an (1853, 4). In the same Laferrière writes that “Icelandic law . . . had been in the of the a long before it was written at the beginning of this law was by the of called the of This sort of the interest of French jurists and historians in on the as evidence of legal In Icelandic law is of a widespread are in Iceland, And this of gradually came to on the (Davy the remained example, the in a study published in in the they the interest in the the for the was the for written laws are the of his he was of civil French jurists saw the as the of the “Icelandic legal The interest of French legal scholars in Iceland should not be In many the Icelandic legal to historians and jurists a to find an but political and on which to their about the origins of European laws and and the origins of their own But such an approach was on a of only some of which out to be was a in a that has to be was this “Norse school” in French a Certainly, it was a hope that a of liberal jurists Klimrath, influenced by legal It had a on the following which had to in the of and the of the in The to Icelandic sources to through a sort of political which Laferrière until or the to through Norse history the origins of French laws from those of laws of of were of to a into French The political and of its also have to its before the the of Edda, of the sagas and of the Grágás, was as new and Scandinavian works became into French The sciences also a real in France at the of the nineteenth and between the quest for the New and its of new scientific and the influence of other on how to the national law of ancient It was the end of an we should on the of by when to further back than the century in of the origins of the law of de la en Paris, could on not in some

Mendicants, Military Orders, and Regionalism

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.

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

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and WestRuth Mazo KarrasRuth Mazo Karras Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe chronology of the widespread criminalization of same-sex activity in medieval Europe is generally agreed upon. John Boswell argued that up until the twelfth century, same-sex desire and activity were not a major concern to the church or to lay society (writing in the late 1970s he used the terms “homosexuality” and “gay people”).1 When Peter Damian wrote his Book of Gomorrah sometime around the middle of the eleventh century, the first major blast against same-sex relations among the clergy, the Pope declined to act on it.2 Boswell argued that this changed in the thirteenth century, when legal systems began to adopt strict penalties (and sometimes enforce them) and churchmen, following in particular the lead of Thomas Aquinas, used the discourse of “nature” to cast any nonreproductive sex as deeply deviant. Joan Cadden has demonstrated that the discourse of “nature” was far from unitary. “Nature” could be understood in different ways, and medical commentators thought that it was in some men’s natures to desire penetration; but while this demonstrates that the concept of “natural” was indeed very complicated, these writers had to work against a backdrop of church doctrine.3R. I. Moore adopted Boswell’s argument and connected it to a larger framework of the “formation of a persecuting society.”4 This was the era in which the church set up legal frameworks to investigate heretics and Jews, but not, Moore suggests, because heretics were becoming a worse problem. He argues these apparatuses were a way for the emerging secular powers, in concert with the church, to establish and exert authority. The categorizing and persecution of religious and sexual deviance were thus part of the logic of developing institutions of power. Moore suggests that the persecution of what he calls “male homosexuality” came somewhat later than that of heretics and Jews, but he notes the Council of Nablus in the early twelfth century and the connection of sexual deviance with Islam, as well as with heresy. As I will argue, this connection was indeed central to the shift in the central Middle Ages toward the persecution of same-sex activity by secular authorities. The criminalization of same-sex activity in the Latin West may have been an unintended consequence of Western European polemic against Muslim societies.This article will for the most part not deal with the church’s attitudes toward same-sex relations, nor with the more positive aspects of same-sex relations in medieval culture. Scholars of medieval sexuality, particularly in the field of literature, have demonstrated the existence of subcultures of same-sex sex, love, and desire, whether expressed through identity, writing (including rich traditions of love poetry in many medieval languages), or action. There is much in the Middle Ages that is distinctly queer, and accepting of the queer. Here I discuss a grimmer reality about same-sex activity during this period: state violence against it, or the threat thereof.Terminology in this area of study can be difficult. Michel Foucault famously connected the invention of the “homosexual” with bourgeois modernity: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”5 In the realm of law, whence he originally derived it, Foucault’s distinction between acts and identities does hold up better than it does in some other areas. It was not homosexuality, as an identity or way of being, that was criminalized, it was particular acts. Therefore, while I occasionally use “homosexual” as an adjective (for acts rather than persons), I stay mainly with “same-sex sexual activity.” Sodomy is used here only where the Latin or medieval vernacular uses its cognate. It does not always refer to same-sex activity; indeed, Foucault called it an “utterly confused category” and suggested that, “as defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them.”6 It could be used to denote any sort of sexual intercourse other than penis-in-vagina, man-on-top. It could also be used in a more generalized way to mean not specific activities but rather a general miasma of sexual sin.7 Therefore it must be considered carefully in context. Mark Jordan argued that it does not have a stable meaning in medieval theology but is associated with outsiders, and easily slips into metaphors of contagion.8 Often legal contexts do not use it at all. When it does appear in a legal context, it most often means sex between two men. To discuss same-sex relations as a sin in an ecclesiastical context, as in the enumeration of the various branches of lechery by late medieval moralists, writers most often used euphemisms: “sin against nature” or “unspeakable sin,” the former of longer standing and the latter coming into use in the twelfth or thirteenth century.9Sexual accusations as political tools against those in power were of course known in the Middle Ages, and not limited to same-sex relations.10 Henry IV, enemy of Pope Gregory VII and the church reform movement, was accused by churchmen of committing sexual sins with both genders.11 These were rhetorical rather than practical accusations. It is hard to know how much real concern with behavior was behind them, and how much they merely reflect partisan mud-slinging; but this sort of mud was available to sling. Similarly, when Orderic Vitalis complains about the sodomy rampant at the Anglo-Norman court, it cannot be taken as a true account of the behavior there, but it is noteworthy that it is an accusation of sodomy rather than some other form of debauchery that he chooses to level at William Rufus’s courtiers—a choice made clearer by the fact that he accuses the king himself of heterosexual debauchery.12 In any case, political accusations in this period, the eleventh to twelfth centuries, did not bring with them prosecution. For the most part, secular law in Latin Christendom up through the central Middle Ages was not especially concerned with same-sex behavior.The chronology in the Greek world is somewhat different, with Justinian issuing a novella in 538 calling for the death penalty for those engaged in crimes against nature.13 Justinian’s Institutes also followed some earlier Roman interpretations of the Lex Iulia de adulteriis, providing the death penalty for adultery, which included same-sex activity between males.14 Procopius reports that some men were punished with castration even though this was not provided in the law, and suggests that accusations of unnatural activity were used as a way of attacking political enemies.15 But Angeliki Laiou points out that although the death penalty for sodomy can be found in later Byzantine law, the examples are much earlier, and by the central Middle Ages commentators who read these passages were not providing contemporary examples, as they were for other crimes.16A turning point for the prosecution of same-sex activity in Western Europe, although it did not take place in Western Europe, came already in the twelfth century, well before Boswell’s invocation of thirteenth-century understandings of “nature.” An assembly at Nablus in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1120 provided for exile, mutilation, or death for a number of sexual offenses. This assembly, often referred to as a council in modern scholarship but called a conventus publicus et curia generalis by William of Tyre, the one chronicler to mention it, was called by both the patriarch and the king of Jerusalem and was attended by lay as well as ecclesiastical officials.17 The basic purpose of the council was to resolve the investiture conflict for the kingdom of Jerusalem: the first three canons constitute what is called the Concordat of Nablus, in which the king and nobility granted complete control of tithes to the church.18 The canons then continue, however, to regulate other activity, including what has been called the first dress code legislation in Europe (forbidding Franks from dressing in Saracen clothing) and a number of canons on sexual activity. The latter prescribe extremely harsh punishments. For example, canon 5 provides an unprecedented punishment for adultery on the part of a man: “Whoever shall be proved to have lain with the wife of another, the sentence of the court having been heard, shall be emasculated, and shall be expelled from this land. The adulteress shall have her nose cut off, unless her husband wishes to show mercy to her. If he does so, let them both cross the sea.”19 Roman law had given the husband the right under some circumstances to kill the couple if they were in flagrante, but the state provided only the punishment of exile. Leviticus did prescribe the death penalty, although it was not enforced in Jewish law after the destruction of the Temple; Christ’s admonition to the crowd, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” was a response to this law. The church condemned adultery by both men and women, set penance for it, and sometimes allowed a husband to repudiate his wife for it, although not to marry another.20 The canons of Nablus also provided castration or other maiming for other sexual crimes, in particular those across religious lines, for example, canons 12–13: “If a man is proved to have knowingly lain with a Saracen woman, let his penis be cut off, and let her nose be cut off. If a man rapes his own Saracen woman, let her be enslaved to the fisc, and let his testicles be cut off.”21The punishment for sodomy was even harsher: burning. The canons made a distinction between the active and the passive partner, although only to emphasize that both were to be subject to punishment (if adults): “If any adult is proven to have defiled themself willingly with sodomitical depravity, both the active and the passive partner shall be burned.”22 Canon 10 seems to imply that regardless of age the passive partner could be a victim of rape: “If someone, having suffered sodomitic wickedness by force, conceals it and permits themself to be polluted again and does not declare it to justice, and it shall afterward be proved, let them be judged as a sodomite.” Canon 9, however, suggests that this is more likely a child or old person: “If a child or aged person is defiled by force by a sodomite and raises an outcry, the sodomite shall be given over to the flames.”23 In medieval monasteries, as discussed by Elliott, or in the subculture of medieval Florence described by Michael Rocke, sodomy is an age-patterned offense, mature men or older boys with younger boys.24 The inclusion of elders as victims here suggests that this is perhaps not a matter only of desire, shaped by the cultural division into active masculine and passive effeminate, but also of physical strength. It is noteworthy in the canons of Nablus, as in so many other contexts, that the only sexual behavior by women that is a matter of explicit concern is with men, particularly men of other groups, but it is possible that the masculine singular is meant to be inclusive; burning, unlike castration, could be applied to either sex. The death penalty here suggests that sodomy was considered the most serious of the offenses, although burning was specified only for the third offense; the first could be expiated with penance, the second with penance and expulsion from the kingdom.We do not know to what extent these laws were put into force. One point that suggests that they were not is the use of the different language for mutilation for sexual crimes. Four different terms are used for the genital mutilation of men (eviretur, ementuletur, extesticulatur, eunuchizabitur), and two for the nasal mutilation of women (enasetur, naso curtetur). The different punishments are for different offenses and it is possible that things were so finely calibrated that a different kind of mutilation happened for different offenses, but not in all cases: “emasculate” and “eunuch-ize” must also be the same thing as removal of either the penis or testicles or both. Two different terms are also used for burning for sodomy: comburatur, flammis tradatur. This is very likely to be elegant variation, whether in terminology for the same thing or in thinking up an appropriate punishment that was not (as yet) practiced. As Klaus van Eickels suggests, the use of language is an indication that the canons were intended to be largely symbolic, a statement of the moral stance of the ecclesiastical and lay authorities, realigning the community with God by placing extremely harsh punishments on behavior believed to contradict God’s law.25 It sounds much too careful to be a codification of current practice. The fact that William of Tyre is the only chronicler to mention the council—Fulcher of Chartres says nothing about it—and that he does not list the canons but simply says that copies were placed in all the churches, suggests too that the canons were not intended to be practical law; for William it was important that the council or conventus had placed the king and patriarch of Jerusalem in positions as leaders of the Latin East.26 Indeed, it is not certain that the canons as found in the Sidon manuscript are exactly those enacted at the council.The context is important here, especially as the king’s predecessor Baldwin I may have, as Jay Rubenstein puts it, “lived in a chainmail closet” and had male Muslim or ex-Muslim lovers.27 Certainly sexual contact between members of the different communities in the Latin East was not unknown: Baldwin I and Baldwin II married Armenian Christians, as did many other Franks.28 Marriage between Christians of different communities, however, was very different from sexual relations between Christians and Muslims, which could not be recognized as marriage; in addition, it was different from sexual activities between two men. The major military defeat suffered by an Antiochene army in 1119 (the “Field of Blood”) may have prompted the attendees at the council to assert a particularly strong moral code of conduct, a performance of purity, particularly directed against sexual misbehavior with non-Christians, who could have been a threat in the case of invasion.29 But the focus on purity need not be solely a direct result of that battle. In the early years of Outremer there was a general sense of being a frontier society and a consequent concern about behavior that might put the community at physical or moral risk. The Franks thought of themselves as the heirs of Biblical leaders like Joshua, who had counseled the Israelites to remain pure (Joshua 23), refraining from intermarriage and idolatry among other things.30Benjamin Kedar has demonstrated that the canons of Nablus resemble Byzantine legal issuances, and suggests the direct or indirect influence of the Ecloga, dating from 741 on some of the punishments. This influence may have come via the local Greek Christian population. Castration as punishment appears in the Ecloga, though not specifically for the offenses for which the Nablus canons prescribe it. The punishment for adulteresses in Nablus—having the nose cut off—resembles that in the Ecloga, where the same punishment was applied to men as well for various offenses. Death by the sword is the punishment for male-male sex, although the “passive” partner may be spared if underage, and penectomy is the punishment for bestiality.31 Van Eickels points out that castration was practiced in Norman realms, although nowhere else, as a punishment for political offenses, and many of the lords and in the kingdom of Jerusalem have been with it from It is found occasionally in Western Europe for various offenses, as in a from the thirteenth century, or in of castration as punishment does not up in other legal from the Latin It could be that its use here, taken from Greek law, was an to the Latin leaders as leaders of all the Christians in the is a certain logic to castration as a punishment for sexual offenses. The point of harsh punishments for adultery in the ancient at was to the of the This is an under Roman law was a married who had sex with a man not her or a man who had sex with with it a of the sexual so that a married man who had sex with a not his wife could be considered an although this was not For the man who with castration as punishment was not the removal of the with which the had been although that was a for various of It also was a removal of the to The between intercourse and to what has called a in which the to not the of the was Castration for appeared in other European legal in laws to William the and in the although again it is not that this penalty was applied in between men in the canons of Nablus did not into this the punishment there was the first in Western European that this was the the law from one of the had provided castration and for men who had sex with other men know about the of a law, or indeed the behind do have the of that Justinian enforced his own the castration of men in same-sex relations, a century which may have the But Nablus was providing death like the is in the century that a punishment in Western The de et de in the thirteenth century in the sodomy by the penalty of burning as provided for sodomy in Nablus and castration as provided there for other crimes. This thirteenth-century in law may have been by laws and attitudes in The de et de is noteworthy as the first of secular law same-sex The sodomy is used here to that women perhaps be understood as included The canons of Nablus use masculine forms in about but it is possible it is intended in a like against can to both men and women, although the of have men, and modern work Boswell’s referred to “gay he mainly some of the have given for same-sex between women do not appear very often in the they did not because they did not women from to legal because they did not because they did not and because of that made women did not matter very of the for criminalization to men. has in late medieval but in the one he in most the was only not either or male and same-sex relations were to a where one partner the male and one the In some however, was used for a by has demonstrated this for the castration and then of for men in same-sex and of a for The is not one may that it is the penis for men. suggests that the of the passages on men and women that the an to the castration, as far as I can this is not as a medieval punishment for The Nablus with the of castration and for adultery, that the mutilation might be considered the which to the ancient world as a punishment for women, appears for in religious which to being and in (as in de in which the the nose of his It also was used as a punishment in Western Europe, as in the of of II of in a law of II from around it is a more punishment than being by her although if her husband did not to her be This may be a Byzantine as is the law of of from that an her nose and also seems to have used this punishment on a of as either or especially for sex both male and and suggests that it sometimes or was to It could also be an of the of the with which one this case, not the nose but the the being that a was the of of in via the and appears in medieval for in the at the as punishment for the the is to for the first and second may also be a or a and a man could be condemned to a the second may have been the the might not have had a of what was merely to The is not an although it to be the laws of the kingdom of it may have been made by a or for his own of it is a of Justinian’s as well as the of the The on sodomy is found in a set of punishments to be current in the of It is not that they reflect contemporary practice. There are other crimes as by a by burning but most by The only other one for which the punishment is mutilation, however, is where has to a and is punished by the of The both of castration as punishment for sexual and of secular punishment for sodomy are and here and could well have come from the de in the thirteenth century by de a not a the canons of Nablus, burning for and as punishment for or and for and it “Whoever against the and does not to to the way of or who he must be and all his of also provided death for The on sodomy is as to the penalty, but into much more with to the of sodomy sin that men with women do not come into and the extent to which God may have used sodomy with as an accusation against his political also the death penalty for sodomy in two late thirteenth-century in which and in which burning. In case, are included in a list of to be punished in this It is noteworthy that of these whether from or is a of legislation perhaps the which were not put into all are what to be but in an could have for and found them in the canons of is the between the canons of Nablus and these Western European suggests that the inclusion of the burning of what he calls in the Nablus canons a punishment for in the Middle This is not, however, the case until the thirteenth the canons of Nablus up The the law of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the century, and not specifically on the of this or other crimes, but on the for the death penalty the of the says in a shall not to and then in and and will The as the of the on and the following in those and be put to The burning of was not, as points taken from law the of this it seems to have come from the canons of Nablus the can thirteenth-century from Europe have been by its I cannot that they but they could have Nablus was of its on John the of Nablus against as the same the Council a century which that and be from Christians in their dress and specified the as the of This could well have been not the same but on of the Nablus to William of Tyre, copies of the canons of Nablus were placed in church in the kingdom of even given to can that there were copies one has from the church of The other legal as up in the of the by the of who is known to have been in between and copies of the may have up in Europe earlier but are not As points however, there were a number of European who are in the Latin East for a of one or years at a and who may have to have been in Roman and canon rather than in or law, but as the de et de is in part a from or of Roman law, it is that the person who it had with a who had in it need not be a law or set of canons that known in Western could have been even if do not know the was not to Europe from the Middle nor I here that it more in the twelfth I that it at that to more because it was a of and for only in to sexual activity was often as a place where a must be in terms of might a that could not be This is in the canons of The sexual of and but often not, was a of Christian particularly in the context of against The of these accusations have to do with the of Christian women by Muslim that did in or in as did the of Muslim women by Christian men, and the of women by members of their own religious but widespread of the Muslim of especially the of and of the of men’s having sex with their in law, to this that or Christian boys or adult men were also current at the of the or and the

Rodney Hilton's seminal article, ‘Some Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages’, contrasted the small-scale merchant acquisition of urban real property in the thirteenth century with the larger-scale institutional, primarily guild, property accumulations found in the fifteenth century.1 This paper seeks to extend this analysis by looking at the acquisition of property by the church in English towns between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It uses mortmain licences that included grants of property in towns in the midlands in association with other printed medieval material available for the region. It seeks to contribute to the important question of the relationship between lordship and urban development by making some observations about the investment strategies employed by church landlords, and by establishing a comprehensive chronology of church acquisition in medieval towns. Religious institutions were the most important urban landlords of the later middle ages. By the fourteenth century Westminster...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was presented, in an earlier form, on a panel dedicated to animate images chaired by Dr. Jacqueline Jung at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2005. I thank Dr. Jung, the other panelists, and audience members for their useful input. Dr. Vibeke Olsen generously gave of her time in reading and commenting on a draft of the paper. Also deserving of thanks is Courtney Hill, Undergraduate Research Fellow at Utah State University, who provided assistance in the early stages of research. I received generous institutional support for this project from the Art Department, the Women and Gender Research Institute, and the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Utah State University. Notes 1 – Notably, Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2 – This point is raised (in relation to post-Iconoclastic art theory in Byzantium) by Charles Barber, ‘From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm,’ Gesta, 34/1 (1995), 5–10. 3 – The Gregorian dictum that ‘pictures are the books of the illiterate’ became one of the most widely propagated and intentionally misconstrued apologetics for the image in the medieval west, as Celia Chazelle demonstrated in her article, ‘Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,’ Word & Image, 6 (1990), 138–53. Lawrence Duggan (‘Was Art Really the “Book of the Illiterate”?’ Word & Image, 5 (1989), 227–51) also explored the disingenuousness with which medieval authors employed this trope. Conrad Rudolph noted that Bernard's view of the role of art in the instruction of illiterates was absolutely orthodox in this respect, and that he viewed this as the purview of the secular clergy (Things of Greater Importance: Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 50–4, 194–5). Jeffrey Hamburger observed that ‘Women have historically been regarded as one of the primary, even formative audiences for devotional art, so it comes as a surprise that devotional imagery has never been adequately analyzed in terms of gender,’ a shortfall his own work has done much to address (‘Introduction: Texts Versus Images: Female Spirituality from an Art Historian's Perspective,’ in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 15). 4 – Miracle collections abounded between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and were often tied to a specific shrine, though in the case of Mary, a more geographically decentralized literature of miracles emerged over the last decades of the twelfth century, as discussed by Benedicta Ward in Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215, revised edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 132–3, in passim; in the course of the thirteenth century, these collections became more generalized with a view to use as exempla in sermons. A cogent discussion of this shift and of its causes is found in Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 8–10. 5 – On the relationship between the Mendicant orders and the development of the exemplum collections intended for the use of preachers, see David D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90–131. 6 – Caesarius of Heisterbach, Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterciensis Dialogus miraculorum [Textum ad quatuor codicum manuscriptorum editionisque principis fidem accurate recognovit Josephus Strange] 2 volumes (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966; reprint of Cologne, Bonn, Brussels: S.M. Heberle, 1851); English edition, The Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, with an introduction by G. G. Coulton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1929); Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 2 volumes, ed. V. Frederic Koenig (Geneva: Droz, 1955–1966); no English translation exists; Gonzalo de Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora, 3rd edition, ed. Vicente Beltrán (Barcelona: Planeta, 1990); English edition, Miracles of Our Lady, ed. and trans. Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997); Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda aurea 2nd edition, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Firenze: Tavarnuzze, 1988); English version The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. and trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Alfonso X, o Sábio, Cantigas de Santa Maria, 4 volumes, ed. Walter Mettmann (Madrid: Coimbra, 1959–1972); English edition, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. and trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill, with an introduction by Connie Scarborough (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). 7 – The study of the miracle literature constitutes a discipline of its own, with an extensive critical apparatus. Albert Poncelet, ‘Index miraculorum B.V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt,’ Analecta Bollandiana, 21 (1902), 242–360, lists incipits of miracles of the Virgin found in many of the major Latin collections from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. Tubach's Index Exemplorum catalogs known narrative types used in medieval collections of exempla (didactic stories) for preachers and is used as an indexing tool to cross-reference miracles found in multiple collections. A recent project sponsored by the British Academy and hosted by Oxford University focuses on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, but, according to its organizers, ‘will eventually contain all Latin and vernacular miracle collections associated with the CSM miracle stories, as well as cycles of miracles associated with particular shrines’ (The Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria Database, URL http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.php?p=collections_list, accessed 10 July 2008). Numerous critical studies on the Marian miracle tradition exist, ranging from monographs on single authors, such as Gautier de Coinci, to textual studies of individual miracles, to thematic investigations of parts of or the entire corpus: for a bibliography, see Anne McCormick, ‘Imaging sex: The body and gender in Virgin Mary miracle tales of thirteenth century Spain and France,’ doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1996), 208–31. 8 – The literature on the rise of Marian devotion is vast, but a critical source is Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. I (London: Sheed and Ward, 1985), 210–64. Also see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1988), 125–6, in passim. For development of Marian imagery in the visual and literary arts, see Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). More recently, Margot Fassler has provided a long view of the emergence of Marian devotion as part of the liturgy, and as a stimulus for visual responses: ‘Mary's Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation Around 1000 and its Afterlife,’ Speculum 75 (2000), 389–434. Rachel Fulton's contribution, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), provides important reassessment of the development of Marian devotion in terms of Mary's salvific and empathetic rather than exemplary and maternal role. 9 – Fulton, 204–43. 10 – Carolyn Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), 137. 11 – On the dating and authorship of this antiphon, see Jose Maria Canal, Salve Regina Misericordiae. Historia y leyendas en torno a esta antifona (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1963). 12 – Both examples occur in numerous compilations of miracles and exempla. See Frederic Tubach, Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969), index numbers 536 (appears in 18 distinct texts), 3572 (22 texts), respectively. 13 – Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, vol. I, 525–6. This is Poncelet no. 755. The Latin is found in the Dialogus miraculorum, vol. I, distinctio VII, capitulum XLIV, 62–3. 14 – This visual argument is spelled out most explicitly in the south tympanum of the west façade at Chartres, where the body of Christ in the Nativity scene in the lowest register, in the Presentation in the Temple in the middle register, and on the lap of the Virgin in the upper register underscores the Incarnation and the role of Mary's body as a vessel or seat for the Incarnate Word. See Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1959), 8–12. 15 – Ilene Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 31–60. 16 – Forsyth, 144, 185 (fig. 143). 17 – Forsyth, 131. 18 – For example, when Lancelot, in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (ca. 1170), finds an ivory comb with some hairs from the head of Guinevere, they are described as light and filled with light ‘si clers et si luisanz’ v. 1415). Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, ed. Charles Mela (Paris: Libraire Générale Française, 1994), 540. When Le Comte de la Marche (ca. 1250) praises the beauty of his beloved in a lyric that begins ‘You are like rubies and other precious stones,’ he speaks of the freshness and high color of her complexion. ‘Je me merveille/de la color tant fresche et tant vermeille’ (v. 13–14, Tout autresi comme li rubiz), Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 244. 19 – Respectively: Metropolitan Museum 16.32.194 and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe 1893.199. The Hamburg Madonna is illustrated in Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. Peter Barnett (Detroit: Detroit Institute for the Arts, 1997), cat. 1, 116–7. 20 – Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Importance,’ 50–4, 63–9, 110–24. 21 – See note 3, above. 22 – Bernard of Clairvaux, Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, trans. Marie-Bernard Saöd (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1993), Homily II.2, 16. The translation is based on the authoritative Latin edition by Jean Leclerq and H. Rochais: Sancti Bernardi Opera, IV (Rome: Editiones cistercienses, 1966), 13–58. 23 – For the relationship between chansons courtoise and chansons mariales, see Pierre Bec, La Lyrique Française au Moyen Age: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médioevaux, I: etudes (Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale de l'Université de Poitiers, 6) (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1977) 143. 24 – ‘Rose fresche et clere … nete et pure et sainne,’ Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. V. Frederic Koenig, vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), I Chanson V.III.73, 78, 35, my translation. 25 – Most recently, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, ‘Marian devotion in medieval French literature: In and beyond the world of lyric,’ dissertation, Boston College, 2000. 26 – G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), 18. 27 – The anthropologist J.L. Austin first theorized speech as active (rather than simply reflective or descriptive), and following this model, Liza Bakewell has developed a theory of images as acts (rather than simply representations) which seems a fertile characterization in light of the apparent agency of images in the context of medieval Christianity. See, Liza Bakewell, ‘Image acts,’ American Anthropologist, 100.1 (March, 1998), 22. 28 – This is Poncelet number 168, Tubach number 5152. Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Jesús Montoya (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), no. 38. Translation: Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, The Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 51. 29 – The Cantigas date to the second half of the thirteenth century, but contain many episodes that are attested in earlier literature. 30 – Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, Songs of Holy Mary, 51–2. 31 – For anti-Semitism and the representation of Jews in the CSM, see Dwayne Carpenter, ‘Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature,’ in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed. V. B. Mann, et al. (New York: Brazillier/The Jewish Museum, 1992), 61–87. The same author identifies Jewish disparagement of the Virgin as one of the major themes in the CSM narratives that deal with Jewish characters: see, ‘The portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the learned's Cantigas de Santa Maria,’ in In Iberia and beyond: Hispanic Jews between cultures, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman (Newark/London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 15–42, esp. 16. Further bibliography on the anti-Semitic arguments of the CSM is discussed by Eva Frojmovic, ‘Messianic Politics in Re-Christianized Spain: Images of the Sanctuary in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts,’ in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. E. Frojmovic (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 120–1, note 66. 32 – Ovid, Metamorphoses, books 1–5, ed. William Anderson (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), book 3, lines 155–253, 91–4. On Ovid's currency among educated readers in the later Middle Ages, see Jeremy Dimmick, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 264–87. 33 – The Virgin's breasts — and indeed breasts more generally — were a subject of much devotional rumination. See, for example, Margaret R. Miles, ‘The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,’ in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA, and London: 1985 and 1986), 193–208; Carolyn Walker Bynum ‘Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,’ in Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: 1982), 110–69). 34 – Belting, 432. 35 – Summa Theologia I 5, 4 ad. 1 36 – Even Roger Bacon's Perspectiva concludes with a rationale for the optical theory's utility to contemplation of the divine, as Dallas Denery II discusses in Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. Suzannah Biernoff writes, ‘Sight, as it was defined by Bacon and his contemporaries, offered a means of communion that exceeds Belting's model of “communication’ or ‘dialogue.” The visual relationship — more than any other sensory interaction — allowed for bodily participation in the divine.’ (Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 134.) 37 – Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 71. 38 – The Virgin's gaze as a transgressive example of active female viewing is addressed by Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,’ PMLA, 106, no. 5 (1991), 1083–93. 39 – Poncelet number 804; English version, Dialogue on the Miracles, 500–1; Latin, Dialogus Miraculorum, book VII, capitulum 33, 41–2. 40 – Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, 501; for the Latin, Dialogus Miraculorum, 42. 41 – The notion of the gaze as a violent instrument has been most fully theorized and explored in the context of feminist film studies, building on discussions of violence and rhetoric by Levinas, Lacan, and Derrida. The classic essay is Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16.3 (1975), 6–18, reprinted in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57–68. Mulvey, however, never uses this specific phrase. For a concise summary of arguments pertaining to idea of ‘the violence of the gaze,’ see C. Nadia Serematkis, ‘Intersection: Benjamin, Bloch, Braudel, beyond,’ in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Serematkis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57. 42 – Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Virgin's Gaze,’ 1091. 43 – Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, book VII, capitulum XLV, 64–5. A similar tale is found in the Cantigas, no. 76, and was also included in Jacobus of Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, trans. W.G. Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 155. 44 – The miracle of the knight spared humiliation has several variations, cataloged by Poncelet at nos. 727, 1087, 1443; the miracle of the Virgin of Chincolla is found only in the CSM, where it is miracle no.185 (Oxford CSM Database, http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.php?p=poemdata_view&rec=185, accessed 15 July 2008). 45 – The Theophilus miracle is Poncelet no. 74/75. ‘Douce Dame … de doucheur fontaine et ruissiaus,’ Adam de la Halle, ‘Gloröeuse Vierge Marie’ line 19–20. Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française des XIIe et XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 292. 46 – Michael Cothren, ‘The Iconography of Theophilus Windows in the First Half of the Thirteenth Century,’ Speculum, 59.2 (1994), 310–1, Appendices A and B. 47 – The restriction of subjectivity by the language of the courtly love is widely discussed in literary criticism. For an excellent and critical overview of the scholarship and bibliography, see E. Jane Burns, ‘Courtly Love: Who Needs it? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition,’ Signs, 27 (2001), 23–57. Naomi Wolf's characterization of later-medieval love poetry as silencing women ‘by taking them beautifully apart,’ also relates to the scopic delights of both the courtly lyric and the visual representation of the Virgin (The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), 59). 48 – New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 729 fol. 232v. The miniature is widely reproduced, most recently in color on the cover of Roger Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller, 1999). A full-page reproduction is also available in L'art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils, 1285–1328: Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 17 mars-29 juin 1998 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), cat. no. 202, 299. 49 – Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 6329, fol. 1v. The miniature is reproduced in L'art au temps des rois maudits, cat. no. 205, 304.

THE real problem in the history of parliament, it has been rightly said, is not so much to explain the beginnings of certain modern practices in the house of commons as to attempt to show why popular representation became an essential and inseparable feature of parliament.' Marked as the changes have been in the structure and complexion of parliament, the use of elected representatives has been a persistent feature of parliament since the thirteenth century. In the course of time, this feature has become a dominant and basic fact in modern political institutions. The problem is not to be clarified by any search into origins, no matter how ingenious or far-reaching.2 The house of commons, as we know it today, may be said to date mainly from the seventeenth century, most of its procedure from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The explanation is therefore to be found in tracing the increasing activities of the representatives in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period; it is to be found in tracing the new ideas consequent upon these activities, which resulted in the commons' coming to be considered an essential part of the machinery of parliament. It was the grafting of new ideas and practices onto the old institution which brought about the transformation of the medieval into the modern parliament. Parliament began in the thirteenth century as an expanded session of the king's council. Administrative expedience and financial needs had caused the king to summon before his council at Westminster not only the magnates and greater barons but also elected representatives of the counties and towns. Those representatives, however, appeared only by royal command, and they treated upon those matters in which the king was interested. Throughout the fourteenth and the greater part of the fifteenth centuries, parliament was in a very real sense the king's court. The magnates and representatives in the fourteenth century were scarcely more than the servants and petitioners of the prerogative, and their wishes and grievances were redressed

Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

According to the traditional picture of the history of Western philosophy the High Middle Ages was intellectually Aristotelian, dominated by the Thomist approach. To some extent, this picture was formed already in the Early Modern Era, when many important thinkers distinguished their own philosophy from that of the scholastics. The university philosophy rejected by Descartes, for example, was indeed characteristically Aristotelian, and to a considerable extent even based on a thirteenth-century interpretation of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas. It may be true that the scholastic philosophy, superseded in the seventeenth century by new approaches, was a direct extension of certain Classical trends. However, as a description of what really happened in thirteenth-century Western philosophy, simply categorising it as “unoriginal Aristotelianism” is clearly inappropriate. In fact, many of the crucial philosophical innovations typically associated with early modern thinkers were already established in the thirteenth century or at the latest in the beginning of the fourteenth century. We should not, thus, locate the borderline between Classical and Modern thinking at the Renaissance, as is often done. But it seems equally inappropriate to locate it at the fall of the Roman Empire, like Jonathan Swift did in his tale Battle of the Books. On the contrary, medieval philosophers were in deep debt to classical civilization. The dark centuries in the latter half of the first millennium did imply a significant break in Western European philosophical thinking, but it is nevertheless clear that the medieval schools were established on the basis of the literary heritage of Classical tradition, in the Latin community almost as directly as on the Arabic side. It was only little by little that the discussions in medieval universities were able to formulate from this material new kinds of philosophical thinking that could be called distinctively modern. The historical picture looks remarkably similar to this also in the case of the philosophy of the self. Medieval philosophers brewed modern thought from classical materials. The first full century of university life, the thirteenth century, initially saw a radical expansion in the knowledge and command of the ancient literary material, and then a radical re-evaluation of the deeper philosophical issues involved. The century began with an approach that can broadly be regarded as Platonist. The philosophy of self, in particular, was at first largely based on an Augustinian brand of the neoplatonic–stoic thinking, which was dominant in the

182 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) although traditional, is seen as deliberately placed to make an ideological point. Ghosh points out, too, how the Mirror ‘is almost obsessively, concerned either to justify its own biblical lectio as rational, or to defend its transcendence of reason’ (161). For Ghosh, Love’s text is inscribed within the Lollard framework. Chapter 6, on the anti-Lollard Thomas Netter, illustrates how common ground can still produce divergent readings. Both men sought a determinate religious truth, but Netter finds this truth firmly in the Church and traditional hermeneutics. Ghosh also shows how Netter was defending not only the Church, as has been proposed, but academia which was now under threat. Yet Ghosh points out how Lollardy had really only highlighted the inherent tensions in latemedieval scholasticism. The reaction was not immediate, but resulted in divergent positions of orthodoxy and heresy. Nevertheless Lollardy, says Ghosh, ‘half won the battle of ideas’ (212) and because it emerged from the academic milieu it also helped to fundamentally change that milieu. The Wycliffite Heresy is a welcome book, clearly written and complex, which should provoke more research and more reassessment of the still understudied pre-Reformation period. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Grant, Edward, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001; paper; pp. ix, 397; RRP AU$55; ISBN 0521003377. This ambitiously titled work aims to explain the function of ‘reason’ in medieval intellectual life as it developed within the university. Reason, the author explains, ‘played its most significant role in preparing the way for the establishing of a deep-rooted scientific temperament that was an indispensable prerequisite for the emergence of modern science’ (p. 3). Professor Grant is eminently qualified for such a task, having published five monographs to date dealing on the topic of science in the late middle ages. Grant explains that his book seeks to support the thesis that the eighteenth century, or enlightenment, ‘was an age of faith as well as reason and the thirteenth century was an age of reason as well as of faith’ (p. 7). In the opinion of this reviewer, he is largely successful in doing so. Grant structures the work into seven chapters. Chapter one describes the socalled ‘low point’ of European civilisation in the early middle ages, and the Reviews 183 Parergon 21.1 (2004) developments in reason and rationality which transformed European society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chapter two focuses on how these eleventh and twelfth-century developments in the use of reason in theology, natural philosophy and law built on, yet challenged, classical and early medieval authority. Chapter three describes the particularly Aristotelian elements of these changes involving reason, and their adoption by the universities in the thirteenth century. The next three chapters move on to ‘Reason in Action’ in the universities : one on logic in the Faculty of Arts, a second on Natural Philosophy (or physics) in the Faculty of Arts and a third on Theology in the Faculty of Theology. The final chapter, ‘The Assault on the Middle Ages’, examines the process by which historians have depicted medieval intellectual thought, and the middle ages itself, as ‘dark’, ignorant and backward-looking – that is lacking reason. It is this perception which Grant is at pains to refute. God and Reason is particularly convincing when examining fourteenthcentury natural philosophy or natural science: what we now know as physics. Here Grant is on familiar territory. His findings are paradoxical. On the one hand, medieval scientists adopted an Aristotelian tradition of empiricism which emphasised experience and observation in sciences such as mathematics, astronomy and optics. On the other, however, this medieval turn placed greater emphasis on ‘thought experiments’ than direct empirical observation or measurement (p. 79). Nevertheless, Grant argues, this latter interpretation was consistent withAristotle’s own epistemology. The detailed analyses of the treatises of figures such as John Buridan and Nicole Oresme provide a valuable corrective to those who wrongly assume that scholastics were more interested in self-indulgent logical and theological conundrums than in understanding the natural world. These findings are buttressed by the final chapter, ‘TheAssault on the Middle Ages’. Grant exposes the myth linking...

When Wealth Was Good and Poverty Sin:Profit, Greed, Generosity, and the Creation of the Noble Merchant in Konrad Fleck's Flôre und Blanscheflûr Katja Altpeter-Jones In his book Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, the historian Joel Kaye writes, "[t]he taint on commerce and profit seeking so clear in [Aristotle's] Politics remained a potent influence on scholastic moral and economic thought."1 Commerce and trade, its desired outcome (profit), and those who practiced the former and benefited from the latter (merchants, vendors, and small peddlers) were, in other words, frequently looked upon with suspicion during the Middle Ages. The aristocracy and nobility, those who commissioned literary works, were the main patrons of artists and writers, and constituted the audience for much of the literature produced during the medieval period, may have shared in and approved of the skepticism of theologians and philosophers. They, too, may have looked with suspicion upon the growing number of increasingly wealthy and powerful merchants who populated the cities and rivaled or surpassed the aristocracy in wealth, sophistication, and political influence. The literary historian John A. Yunck writes: "The cash-centered soul, the fiscal villain, innocence and decency crushed by the might of money, are common data of human experience."2 In the thirteenth century, merchants were among those suspected of fiscal malice, of being greedy and deceitful, of driving a hard bargain for personal profit and at the expense of the poor and the common good. "The merchant in the Middle Ages was not held in contempt as commonly as he is said to have been [ . . . ]," [End Page 1] writes Jacques Le Goff. "Nevertheless, while the Church very early gave protection and encouragement to the merchant, it long allowed serious suspicions to persist as to the legitimacy of essential aspects of his activity."3 Mercantile enterprises were suspect primarily because their expected outcome was profit. The issue of profit did not fit easily into scholastic economic thought, for "[i]n contrast to the theories of classical economists and to our modern understanding of economic motivation, in both Aristotelian and scholastic economic theory, not profit and the desire for gain but the establishment of equality is the proper motive and end of exchange."4 "What the Doctors in the Middle Ages were really interested in was to determine the rules of justice governing social relations," concurs Raymond de Roover.5 And he adds, "the Schoolmen considered equity in distribution and exchange as the central problem in economics."6 In a model in which justice and equity were the guiding principles of economic exchange, profit, which smacked of injustice and inequality, had to be a contentious issue. Thus even late medieval commentaries on trade and commerce frequently "betray a lingering disdain for individuals engaged in mercantile pursuits and a persistent anxiety about whether it was actually possible for a merchant to live a life free from dishonor and sin."7 Yet, attitudes towards merchants and their business were not consistently negative. In the first half of the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor extols the merchant as an agent of peaceful negotiation, and commerce as a catalyst for the increase of communal wealth and welfare and an enterprise that "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes private good of individuals into the common benefit of all."8 Kaye points out that by the thirteenth century, moods began to shift even more dramatically as "[t]he growth of the consciousness of money's place and function in society paralleled the rise of the merchant estat from a lowly [End Page 2] position to one of great social and political power over the course of the long thirteenth century."9 Summarizing Henry of Ghent's thoughts on the role of the merchant, articulated during the last quarter of the thirteenth century, Kaye writes: "By the late thirteenth century, the value placed on the common good had grown sufficiently great to change the designation of particular occupations and particular economic acts from evil to good within scholastic discourse."10 Part of this growing interest in the common good and the subsequent reevaluation of the merchant's role in society was, in the...

Oral performance, writing, and the textual tradition of the medieval epic in the romance languages: the example of the Song of Roland The medieval epics composed in Old French, Old Provencal, and Old Spanish constitute a sizeable body of material. At least 206 manuscripts and 106 fragments have survived into the modern period. Approximately 95 percent of these are written in French, four percent in Provencal, and one percent in Spanish. The scarcity of surviving discrete epics from south of the Loire can be seen from the fact that while 120 of the poems are in French, only nine in Provencal and three in Spanish are extant in their poetic form. W e generally speak as if most of the French epics which circulated in the Middle Ages have survived in some shape, although it is known that a number of works have not. For southern France, the issue is marked by controversies. M y own opinion is that a flourishing epic literature was largely wiped out during the cultural catastrophe known as the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the destruction of the economic, social, and political bases upon which Provencal culture was built. For Spain, we are fortunate in having summaries of several epics incorporated into chronicles, and in some cases sequences of poetic lines have been recovered intact from the prose. The number of epics available to twelfth and thirteenth-century Castilian audiences was undoubtedly substantial, but one has no way of knowing just how large it was. When one compares the quantity and distribution of epics in the Romance languages with the corpus of such poems in neighbouring language areas, such as the Anglo-Saxon with Beowulf and a few fragments of other works, or the Old High German, it is obvious that while the Spanish and Provengal numbers are fairly typical, the surviving French tradition is unusually large. If one were to set out to read even a single version of each French epic, one could look forward to perusing nearly a million lines of poetry. But even for French the fragility of the tradition is underscored by the fact that around 40 percent of the chansons de geste are extant in only one copy. Virtually all of the manuscripts of which I speak were written down in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the great age of copying being the hundred years or so that begin around 1250 during which over half of our texts were set down in the form in which we have them today. A single manuscript survives from the twelfth century, the Oxford text of the Song of Roland. I have chosen the Roland as my main example, not simply because it is the most popular and the most frequently studied of the epics, but because its versions—both in French and in various other medieval languages—differ considerably among themselves, because its texts span the chronological range, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and because it has been edited more often than any epic in the body of medieval Western 80 3.3. Duggan literature.4 Before going into the textual phenomena, however, I would like to say a few words about the poem's literary and social context. It is my belief that the medieval Romance epic was fundamentally an oral genre, that is to say one in which poems were composed, transmitted and performed orally before being set down in writing, with the aid of techniques particularly suited to a state of civilization in which cultural material was primarily conveyed in oral tradition. Obviously we only perceive the epic of that period through its written manifestations, and one of the great problems is how to distinguish the scribe's contribution from the singer's. Some epics were composed, in the form in which we have them, in writing: the Mocedades de Rodrigo, in all likelihood, and certainly the three epics produced by Adenet le Roi, the late thirteenth-century author also responsible for the romance ClGomades, and perhaps others. The epic was not the only type of orally composed poem in the Romance-speaking world of the Middle Ages: many fabliaux surely circulated in tradition, as did...