Royal Towns and Their Role in Keeping the Peace and Legal Order in the Czech Lands in the Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries

THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCISCANS AND THEIR CRITICS I. The Order's Growth and Character Historians of the Franciscan Order have written about the period between the mid-fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries as an adjunct to two peripheral themes: the rise of the Observants and the Great Schism. Conscious of the parallel development of the Observants , some have seen in Conventual history little beyond the decadence and decline that inevitably precede a reform movement.1 Those who have studied the Franciscan involvement in the schism, on the other hand, have either overlooked the Order's internal history entirely or have subordinated it to the broader subject of Minorite participation in church history.2 Writing on Conventual history after 1350, J. R. H. Moorman, David Knowles, A. G. Little and 1 Riccardo Pratesi, for example, in "Francesco Micheli del Padovano, di Firenze, teólogo ed umanista francescano del sec. XV," Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 47 and 48 (1954 and 1955), refers to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as an era of "slackness" and "decadence" in the Order, and points to the insubordination, strife and violence of the friars, along with their ambition for offices, as evidence of this. 2 In a pair of complementary articles, "Die avignonesische Obedienz der Mendikanterorden zur Zeit des grossen Schismas," in Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte, I and II, and "Die avignonesische Obedienz im Franziskanerorden zur Zeit des grossen abendländischen Schismas," in Franziskanische Studien, I (1914), 165-192, 312-327 and 479-490, Konrad Eubel edited and commented on documents illustrating the history of the Clementine friars during the schism. Otto Hüttebräuker, Der Minoritenorden zur Zeit des Grossen Schismas (Berlin, 1893), is limited to an appreciation of structural changes in the Order and a survey of benefits conferred on the Minorites by the Urbanist and Clementine popes. However, he does recognize in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries "the most important and far-reaching period in the Order's history after the early thirteenth century," and concludes that, because of the even closer ties with the papacy created during the schism, the Franciscan Order consciously underwent a tremendous revitalization and advance, which assured its predominant position in the fifteenth century. ??8CAROLLY ERICKSON others gave an important emphasis to the anti-mendicant literature of the period. And, although they make allowances for exaggeration in degree in the works of the friars' critics, they largely accept their allegations in kind. Too often the abundant anti-mendicant literature of these years has been used to prove flagrant laxness among the Conventuals by historians who have then argued that this corruption itself accounts for the copious writings against the friars. Moorman repeats the accusations in the critical treatises largely without comment, despite his acquaintance with much of the documentary evidence from within the Order.3 Knowles points to the "spirit of the age" as one cause of the fourteenth-century criticism of the mendicants, and notes that historians' dark view of the period after 1350 has been influenced by their estimates of the psychological and demographic effects of the plague of 1348-49.4 The assumption of an inevitable link between falling population and spiritual decline has distorted the interpretation of fourteenth-century history. In Studies in English Franciscan History, A. G. Little was ambivalent in his use of the satirical and polemical literature against the friars, now acknowledging its validity, now adopting a skeptical attitude toward it.5 In an important article on the mendicant-clerical disputes of the fourteenth century, Père Hugolin Lippens shed new light on anti-mendicant criticism. Stressing the clergy's reliance on custom and that of the mendicants on written law, he showed that jurisdictional clashes and written polemic between the two groups were all but inevitable.6 By contrast, G. M. Trevelyan, who wrote a good deal about the friars in his England in the Age of Wyclif, was only too happy to use the claims of Wyclif and other opponents of the friars to make a case against them, and freely admitted his reliance on the critical literature: In the attempt that I have made in this chapter to give some representation...

<i>For gode</i> in Chaucer and the <i>Gawain</i> Poet

Enunciating authority: exonarrative inscriptions on or near miniatures of the Divine Comedy

The appearance of the local centres of glazed ware production in the Palaiologean Period allowed the development of local schools of parade table ware. In the Crimean Peninsula, the local production centres were active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Genoese castle of Cembalo, there were glazed ware workshops from the second half of the fourteenth to the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Along with the manufacture of various forms of original pottery, the artisans of these workshops copied the ornamental compositions which were popular in the Mediterranean area. This article addresses the vessels attributed to the so-called “imitations” or “counterfeits”, which reproduced the samples of the Byzantine glazed pottery of the group of Elaborate Incised Ware, so widespread in the region. Among these vessels, there possibly were the pieces produced in the same workshop or by the same artisan: small handleless cups with small flaring ring-base, bowls, and tureens or dishes with the so-called “aslant” ring-base typical of the Byzantine pottery from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The finds in question testify to the popularity of the Byzantine Elaborate Incised Ware in the Northern Black Sea Area, and the Genoese castle of Cembalo in particular, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Medieval Dobrun

IntroductionTranslation and Reception of Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Literature Marta Marfany The articles published in this volume emerge from a day of seminars entitled "Traduction et réception: La littérature française des xive et xve siècles" that took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, in July 2016. This special issue focuses on French language, literature, and translation, and explores the translation and reception of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French texts, especially in the Crown of Aragon and within Catalan culture. The following essays also look across Europe at the translation and reception of texts in other languages during this period; it looks at translations from French, adaptations, and influences. We believe that the following articles will be of interest to the readership of Digital Philology given their comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, combining medieval French literature with related fields such as medieval Catalan literature, medieval Italian literature, and medieval translations. We take a broad view of literature, exploring historical works (Livy and his translator into French, Pierre Bersuire); manuals of chivalry (such as that of the great philosopher Ramon Llull); a popular fourteenth-century allegorical work (the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine by a French Cistercian monk); as well as the great texts of medieval French literature, for example, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the works of Alain Chartier (compared with those of Dante), the Roman de la Rose, and Paris et Vienne. We also analyze political and philosophical texts and include reflections on language and translation as seen in the works of Nicolas Oresme and Jean Juvénal des Ursins. Under the overall heading of French literature and with the aid of some representative examples, the range of topics covered in this special issue provides a broad view of translation during the fourteenth and [End Page 135] fifteenth centuries. Considered as a way of transferring doctrinal content from one cultural context to another, translation played a central role in the dissemination of knowledge and the appropriation of scholarly and learned discourse by Romance vernacular languages. Translations from Latin therefore were key in the culture of the Late Middle Ages, as they provided access to classical and scholastic works to an educated audience possessing insufficient or no knowledge of Latin. Translations, therefore, lie at the roots of the literary innovations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Late Middle Ages, in addition to the usual legal, biblical, and generally religious texts, there were translations of historical, philosophical, and doctrinal texts, largely classical Latin texts and medieval texts on classical subjects. In broad terms, the increase in types of texts translated caused translation to become a discipline in its own right and to develop its own tradition, its own approaches and certain theoretical elements that generated a range of different ideas and practices. Translation prologues are an example of this, as they provided translators with an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of translating Latin into the Romance languages, to consider the linguistic toils of translation, and to comment on the noble and arduous task of transferring content from a higher culture to a lower one. All these issues appear in the first of the three sections of articles in our collection, which deals with general reflections on translation and reception in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially around concepts of translatio imperii and translatio studii. These reflections are exemplified in the work of two great French figures of the period: the polymath Nicolas Oresme, one of the best known official translators for Charles V of France, and the politician Jean Juvénal des Ursins, who was writing in the early fifteenth century. The first article, entitled "Nicole Oresme's Cultural Translatio in Question," is by Anne-Hélène Miller. Although Oresme's translation of Aristotle is among his most celebrated works, it only represents a part of his overall written production. Miller suggests viewing these official works of translation within the context of Oresme's philosophical thought and literary culture. This enables a study of the cultural inheritance (studii) of his works in the light of the political inheritance (imperii). In the second article of the first section of...

This chapter examines developments from the fourteenth century when hunting acquired new meaning, and more people seemed to participate. In the aftermath of the Qadan attack, King Ch’ungnyŏl’s authority as a militarised monarch solidified. The attack also reinforced hunting as an important military skill and time spent in the field as a significant definer of rulership and masculinity based on a neo-nomadic ethos where the king held power over the realm including wild beasts. Framed within the hunt of the late Koryŏ and wider climate change, this chapter outlines the shifting worldviews and political strategies on the peninsula and in Northeast Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of those forces impacting the peninsula were regional – the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in the 1360s and the rise of the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) – and unleashed political, religious and cultural shifts throughout the region. Other forces came in the form of climate fluctuations and population growth that complicated politics, societies and animal habitats. Korean leaders responded by forming new political bonds of their own both in and beyond the peninsula.

One of the striking features of crusading in the aftermath of the fall of Acre (1291) was the sudden profusion of treatises written to offer advice on how the Holy Land could be recovered. In the years between 1290 and 1335, around thirty such proposals were written containing often detailed information about the Mamluks and practical recommendations on how they could be defeated and expelled from the holy places. This practicality distinguishes the ‘recovery treatises’ from other crusading literature. Prior to this period, non-descriptive writing on the crusades tended to be theological, dealing with the justification of crusading or the morals of participants. After the brief flurry of proposals written in the decades prior to 1335, similar works were rare until the treatises outlining plans for crusades against the Ottomans written in the mid-fifteenth century by such authors as John Torzelo and James Tedaldi. However, a few new proposals dealing with the crusade to the Holy Land were written during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is striking, given the great obstacles posed to such a crusade by the twin scourges of war and plague in Europe, and the greater immediacy of the Ottoman threat. It is possible that these later works were influenced by recovery treatises written between 1290 and 1335, since some of the latter survive in copies made during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries which were held in European libraries, notably that of the dukes of Burgundy. These copies, and the new treatises on the subject, illustrate that the idea of a crusade to recover Jerusalem continued to exert an appeal on later generations at certain times during the period.

Introduction. The article examines some historical and other related circumstances behind the creation of Tuzūkāt-i Tīmūrī (The Code of [Amir] Timur). Goals. The paper seeks to identify the narrative’s place in a variety of written sources on Chagatai military tactics of the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. Results. The study discovers The Code is a composite work compiled from a text allegedly found in Arabia by Abu TalibTurbati in the early seventeenth century, subsequent comments of a translator and a copyist, some fragments of Timurid writings dated from the early fifteenth century, and corrections introduced by the Mughal historian Muhammad Ashraf Bukhari. The final version of Tuzūkāt-i Tīmūrī was completed between the mid-1620s and 1650s at the earliest. The sections about tactics of Amir Timur’s Chagatai army are very likely a combination of messages borrowed by the compilers from fifteenth-century Timurid written sources — and their own interpretations of Safavid (and possibly Mughal) combat practices of later times. Descriptions of combat formations and tactical techniques contained in Tuzūkāt-i Tīmūrī cannot be merely extrapolated to military realities of Amir Timur’ era. However, the narrative does clarify some specifics of Chagatai combat tactics mentioned in the Timurid Zafarnamas (ones by Nizam al-Din Shami and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi). Some of the descriptions are not that clear to contemporary researchers while those were obvious enough to the seventeenth-century authors. For this reason, The Code can be most instrumental in ‘deciphering’ some complicated or controversial patterns of tactics contained in Timurid sources of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Conclusions. It is possible to highlight data pertaining to Chagatai combat tactics of the designated period through comparing the text of Tuzūkāt-i Tīmūrī to those of early fifteenth-century Zafarnamas and other works of the Timurid era.

The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were a period of notable literary activity in the Scottish kingdom. The second half of the fourteenth century saw the production of both John of Fordun's major chronicle, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, and John Barbour's great verse epic, The Bruce. These were followed in the first decades of the fifteenth century by Andrew Wyntoun's rhyming Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland. Then in the 1440s there was another substantial addition to the burgeoning chronicle tradition with the appearance of Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, a reworked, expanded and amended version of Fordun's earlier Chronica.

Although viticulture was widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean, some of its areas possessed a special “wine” reputation. The island of Euboea was among such centers. This article attempts to analyze the state of wine production and wine trade on Euboea from the twelfth to first half of the fifteenth century, in the period when the island was ruled by Byzantium, the Latin triarchs, and Venice. The research is based on Byzantine narratives, decrees of the Venetian Senate, and archaeological data. The author concludes that the twelfth to thirteenth centuries were a time of prosperity for winemaking on the island and that the Latin conquest of Euboea in the early-thirteenth century did not fundamentally affect this sector of economy. Greeks remained the main population group on the island keeping their traditional lifestyle and occupations. In the fourteenth century, wine export continued. In the years of the Venetian rule of the island, called Negroponte by Latin sources, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, local wine production and wine trade experienced a decline. This was largely due to the general deterioration of agriculture in Euboea in connection with the growing Turkish threat and burdensome Venetian taxes, which generally resulted in the demographic decline and economic downfall. Under the circumstances, the retail trade in wine, its protection from external competition, and the attraction of new settlers to Euboea to revive wine production became main objectives in Venice’s economic policy towards its colony. Although this policy had a positive effect in the 1430s and 1440s, it did not change the economic situation on the island in the long term.

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Helen Barr. Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. vi, 229. $60.00. This book constitutes a laudable attempt to move beyond such dichotomies as ‘‘literature and history,’’ ‘‘text and context,’’ and ‘‘form and content ’’ (p. 7) by conceiving of literary language as a form of material social practice. In particular, Barr suggests that ‘‘the formal features of language used in literary texts are essentially freighted with social resonances’’ (p. 8). This statement sets the stage for the readings to follow, each of which deploys the techniques of close reading while elucidating an historical context in which the formal features of the text or texts under discussion may be logically embedded. Though Barr occasionally invokes a theoretical concept—Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of ‘‘suture,’’ for example (p. 87)—the brief introduction to the book comprises her most metacritical statement. Hers is an ambitious project, and it is executed with painstaking attention to detail and an acute sensitivity to the literary qualities of the texts under discussion, making this an illuminating and welcome contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century vernacular poetics. One of the great strengths of this book is that it brings together a wide range of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts, from Wynnere and Wastoure to Lydgate’s The Churl and the Bird. Chapter 1 concerns the ‘‘language of social description’’ in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which Barr identifies as ‘‘contested’’ and ‘‘under strain’’ because of the profound social shifts caused by the plague and the demographic changes it engendered. She demonstrates the workings of ‘‘social description’’ by turning to three disparate texts—Wynnere and Wastoure, Hoccleve’s poem To Sir John Oldcastle, and The Manciple’s Tale, each of which engages with medieval social hierarchy through the media of literary forms and conventions. Wynnere and Wastoure is characterized by a ‘‘variegated texture’’ produced by dramatic shifts in register, diction , and genre; this variegation reflects the social instability of its historical moment immediately post-plague. Hoccleve’s Oldcastle poem similarly responds to social instability, this time by forcefully reasserting normative social hierarchies; this conservative text stands in sharp distinction to both Hoccleve’s own Dialogue and Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale, both of which highlight the constructedness and ‘‘social positionality’’ of literary language. Some chapters focus more on context than others; the second chapter, PAGE 358 358 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:22 PS REVIEWS on Pearl, for example, reads the poem in relation to its conflicting representations of the social class of the dreamer and the maiden, noting that the text’s identification of the dreamer as a jeweler necessarily points to the ambiguous relationship between mercantile and aristocratic sensibilities in the later fourteenth century. In the next two chapters, Barr turns from theological to political writing, exploring the relationship between literary production and the reign of Richard II. Chapter 3 focuses on Gower’s Cronica Tripertita and Richard the Redeless, arguing that while Richard II strove to ‘‘fix the signs of kingship’’ (p. 63) with various forms of courtly image making, both of these texts expose the instability of such signs. As such, they constitute in Barr’s view ‘‘treasonous’’ texts; even as they seek to shore up Lancastrian rule, they challenge the idea of kingship itself by imagining the ‘‘dismantling of [Richard’s] regal image’’ (pp. 78–79). Barr’s exploration of this regal image continues in Chapter 4, which centers on the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. She argues that the poem stages an encounter with a regal figure— Cupid—by way of exposing the ultimate incapacity of Richard to ‘‘suture the king’s subjects . . . into the spectacle of regal display, where the only subject position available to them was one of allegiance and obeisance ’’ (p. 104). Barr’s interest in the limits of representation then logically extends from the first to the third estate in two chapters that discuss various challenges to aristocratic and clerical hegemony. The first reads The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in relation to the 1381 uprisings, arguing that its rhetoric ‘‘can be seen...

The article addresses the origins of the most important tax levied by the Moldavian voivodes during the Middle Ages. This particular tax, named dan’ in the fifteenth-century Slavonic diplomas written by the princely chancellery of Moldavia, has most probably its roots in the tribute that the inhabitants east of the Carpathians paid to the Mongol conquerors from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards. Two centuries later, besides its newer meaning of tax charged on one’s subjects, the Slavonic term dan’ still retains its old meaning of tribute imposed by a foreign power, as attested both by a document from 1456 describing the acceptance of Moldavia’s submission to the Ottoman Empire, and by a series of diplomas issued on behalf of the Podolian rulers in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It is widely known that the term dan’ is generally utilized in late medieval Slavonic sources of Eastern Europe to denote the tribute paid to the Mongols. The author calls attention to a phenomenon labelled “fiscal substitution” that has taken place since the fourteenth century almost everywhere in Eastern Europe, providing significant fiscal benefits to the local administrations, to the detriment of the Mongols. This “fiscal substitution” consists of revenues taken over by the indigenous governance from its own subjects through the medium of the fiscal structures set up by the Mongols a century earlier. After the downfall of the Golden Horde, the already traditional collection of the Mongol tribute continued successfully in various regions as a regular tax paid by subjects in favour of the local lordships. As far as Moldavia is concerned, the long Mongol domination had two main consequences: on the one hand, it favoured the strengthening of its ties with the Slavic regions of Eastern Europe, all placed under the same political hegemony of the Golden Horde, and on the other hand, it allowed the formation of several political and fiscal structures appropriated subsequently by the Moldavian voivodes.

Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

English awareness of Poland was probably at its medieval peak in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century: English merchants were pressing hard into the eastern Baltic, King Richard II married the daughter of the German Emperor, and the earl of Derby took small contingents to fight in Lithuania. This chapter focuses on this period, while setting it in a broader context. The change of political overlordship in the fifteenth century increased the formal links with Poland, but probably made little immediate difference to the merchants since the kings of Poland delegated much of the regulation of trade to the ports. The mid-fifteenth century English descriptions are very different from sixteenth century English discourses. Possibly up to 20 per cent of English exports at times in the early fifteenth century were white, but they should not necessarily be considered as unfinished. Keywords: England; English exports; English merchants; Lithuania; Poland