Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Essays by Thom Mertens by Thom Mertens (review)

Taking this historiographical background into account, this chapter proposes the supersession of Romantic perspectives and the abandonment of the mythical question on the origins of sixteenth century Spanish mysticism, which necessarily involves drawing a more accurate historical contextualisation with the aid of the large number of documents published over the last few decades. It advocates a historical perspective which regards Western Europe between the late Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century as a cultural community of which the Iberian Christian kingdoms were full members; all nations within this West (including Castile, the Low Countries, England, and Italy), these Christianitas, shared the same Church and the same religious orders, had similar legal structures, participated in the same university system, and were affected laterally by movements towards religious reform. Keywords: Christian spiritual literature; Christian tradition; Communitas Christianitas; Western Europe

Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Essays by Thom Mertens

Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Essays by Thom Mertens

Book Review| April 01 2005 Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Middle Ages Series Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Middle Ages SeriesSimons, Walter Thomas Renna Thomas Renna Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utopian Studies (2005) 16 (1): 112–114. https://doi.org/10.2307/20718715 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas Renna; Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Middle Ages Series. Utopian Studies 1 April 2005; 16 (1): 112–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20718715 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressUtopian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2005 Society for Utopian Studies2005Society for Utopian Studies Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The medieval Low Countries are not usually associated with nobility and knighthood, but historical research in the past decades has proven that they should be. This series of essays gives a historiographical overview of the recent literature on the nobility in the medieval Low Countries and links it with major international debates on the subject. This first of the three sections into which this survey is organised deals with the origins and evolution of the nobility, knighthood and ministeriality during the central Middle Ages. The early history of the nobility in the medieval Low Countries would benefit from trans‐regional approaches in order to understand general patterns of development and regional peculiarities, and would offer an opportunity to confront different historiographical traditions by making comparisons with other European regions.

This article reviews what we know about plague and other epidemic diseases in the northern Low Countries before 1450 – the evidence, its limitations, and its implications. I make three observations. First, sources suggest that the Black Death was severe in central inland areas, although we lack conclusive evidence for its impact in the county of Holland. Second, the recurring epidemics occurring in the northern Low Countries were often severe – in certain localities reaching death rates of 20-25 percent. In this respect, Holland was as afflicted as other areas in the Low Countries. Third, while the outbreak of 1439 was a notable exception, most epidemics in the northern Low Countries rarely occurred during or just after grain price spikes, suggesting that food crises were not major drivers of epidemic disease in the period 1349-1450. I support further attempts to obtain empirical evidence for the mortality effects of epidemics in the medieval Low Countries. Ultimately, this information can be the foundation behind insights into other important long-term narratives in social, demographic, and economic history in the region.

The commemoration of the eleventh-century epidemic of ergotism is one of the earliest indications for the existence of a cultural network that developed in the southern Low Countries and Northern France during the high Middle Ages, and that would later extend further to the north. A shared culture is oft en seen as one of the key elements of a collective identity. By taking a cultural network as a point of departure, this chapter explores a possible approach, concentrating on a series of interurban meetings, military contests, religious and urban festivals. The ethnic roots of the inhabitants of the Low Countries diverge, the people in the north boasting their Frisian origin and those in the south pointing to their Frankish ancestry. The chambers of rhetoric developed a culture of interurban cultural rivalry and exchange in the form of the so called landjuwelen , drama festivals. Keywords: cultural network; interurban exchange; medieval low countries

The special issue ‘Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries’ aims at critically questioning how memorial practices, developed through and shaped by the medieval manuscript culture, contributed to strengthening religious communal life between the tenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The introductory article briefly examines the research traditions that have informed this collection of essays. On the one hand there is the tradition of memory studies, which since the late 1980s has become increasingly important in many humanities disciplines, particularly in medieval studies with its significant interest in the impact of the religiously-inspired memoria culture on medieval society. On the other hand, since the 1990s the same field of medieval studies has also been marked by the rise of material philology, which has not only fuelled many theoretical debates about the way in which our textual heritage should be understood and edited, but has also resulted in a renewed appreciation of the study of manuscripts themselves as meaningful bearers of medieval textual traditions. The introductory article subsequently explains how combining these two research traditions compels us to reconsider the role of manuscripts (cartularies, miscellanies, collections of sermons, etc.) and the deployment of genres (annals, charters, lives, necrologia, treatises, etc.) in the study of the culture of memoria in medieval religious communities.

Ludo Milis graduated from Ghent University in 1961 as the last student of François-Louis Ganshof, who in the years after Henri Pirenne’s retirement was the most prominent representative of the famous “Ghent School” of medieval history. Milis’s own academic career at Ghent span four decades in which he followed in the footsteps of his masters, yet also explored new directions. Like his predecessors, Milis always attached great importance to the critical examination of primary sources, but for him, such work must serve broader historical inquiry guided by a precise set of questions and methodological rigor. His interests lay primarily in the study of religious and cultural history, which previously had been neglected at Ghent; he was also a pioneer in the history of mentalities in the Low Countries. Milis’s research and thought found expression in several books, among which his Angelic Monks and Earthly men. Monasticism and its Meaning to Medieval Society (Boydell, 1992), translated into many languages, was probably the most influential. This collection contains eleven essays published between 1969 and 1990. Most of them appeared in Dutch or French and have now been translated into English; two essays previously published in English were newly edited. All provide unique insight in the major themes of Milis’s work: the religious history of the Low Countries during the early and high Middle Ages, as well as the problem of religious conversion and persuasion; the rise of regular canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (also the subject of his doctoral dissertation on the order of Arrouaise, published in 1969); the uses of power and ideology; and the history of French Flanders. All bear witness to Milis’s inspiring ability to ask original, probing questions and to write historical syntheses accessible to a wide audience. The collection is presented to Ludo Milis by his students on the occasion of his retirement and his sixty-fifth birthday.

Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting

This article argues that, to do justice to the institutional context of international trade in the later medieval Low Countries, a legal-historical study is necessary. Instead of considering commercial exchange from the perspective of mono-causal explanatory frameworks that assume the primacy of either the state or the city, all institutions that had an impact on the transaction costs of merchants’ activities should be studied in their own right. The pattern that thus emerges for the Low Countries between 1250 and 1500 is one in which arrangements concerning international trade were characterized by a strong complementarity of the central and the local level, rather than an antithesis between benevolent cities and predatory states.

In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as they came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines available in English in almost fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower and middle class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities. Based on the archival records left by about 300 beguine communities, Cities of Ladies illuminates the context of beguine writings, which are considered among the most significant documents of medieval women's mysticism. In updating and expanding our knowledge of the beguines, Simons makes a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, religious change, and gender in medieval Europe.

Transforming the landscape: Cistercian nuns and the environment in the medieval Low Countries

REVIEWS 307 traders known as Radhaniyya were important conveyors of slaves. The Balkan region, especially the Slavic and Bulgar regions, provided the main sources of slaves for Byzantium. The Greek synonym word for slave is sklavos, and this attests to the Slavic origin of these slaves. Rotman meticulously researched the evolution of the slave trade routes throughout the geo-political changes occurring in the Byzantium world between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Rotman provides a map featuring trade routes and a table explaining the ever-changing geopolitical space of these turbulent times. The definitions of slave in the Byzantine world closely track the development of the idea of slavery and freedom in the medieval world. Rotman undertakes a fascinating linguistic analysis of all the terms denoting some type of slave status. He analyses the frequency of slave-related references and their possible use in shedding light on the role of slaves in the Byzantine world by looking at public documents, private documents, hagiographical literature, historiographical literature, and sources such as the papyri of Egypt (6th–7th c.), the archives of Athos/Patmos (9th–11th c.), documents of Cappadocia (10th– 11th c.), and documents of southern Italy (11th c.). The closing chapters analyze the evolution of the concept of “unfreedom,” the Byzantine church and its relation to slavery, and the beginning of the perception of slave as human being . Rotman states that the definition of the person of free status was linked to his religious identity, to his community, and to his state. The slave started being perceived as human for a religious reason and a political reason: in the first case, the slave owed his allegiance to God and not to his fellow man; in the second, the slave owed his allegiance to the imperial state, not his master. In Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, Rotman analyzes Byzantine slavery from civil, social, and economic viewpoints, focusing on this social dependency of a private nature in an enlightening, provocative, intelligent, and relevant way. As he points out, slavery as a civic institution no longer exists in the modern world, yet unfreedom is found everywhere. MIHAELA L. FLORESCU, French and Linguistics, Cerritos College Wybren Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century, trans. David F. Johnson (Leiden: Brill 2008) xiii + 486 pp. This excellent, thorough monograph provides the Anglophone world with a richly-detailed account of one of the earliest collections of Middle Dutch prose, The Limburg Sermons, a thirteenth-century corpus of spiritual and contemplative texts found in MS The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 70 E5 (given the siglum H; the manuscript also contains the earliest extant Dutch dramatic poetry , the Maastricht (Ripuarian) Passion Play, on the final folios—fols. 233v– 247v—but this text was likely added to the MS somewhat after the Sermons were copied, despite a continuity of pricking through fol. 236). This collection of sermons is remarkable not only for its primacy in Dutch prose and the Netherlandish spiritual tradition, but also for its virtuosic incorporation of sources both local and distant: letters from Hadewijch and a treatise by Beatrice of Nazareth are used, and the bulk of the sermons are translations and adaptations of certain of the Middle High German sermon collection known as the St. Georgen Sermons. REVIEWS 308 This volume contains an exhaustive discussion of the sources of the sermons , the choices the compiler made in assembling his materials (and, when applicable, in translating from MHG), the general spiritual milieu in which they were likely produced, and several images of relevant MSS and block books. The book ends with several appendices that give us a codicological description of MS H, the rubrics by which the 48 sermons are identified, a concordance presenting an overview of the transmission history, a glimpse at the translations which changed the addressees of the sermons from female to male, and finally a Modern English translation of the two most important sermons from the collection (Ls. 31, This is the Book of the Palm Tree, and Ls. 39, This is the Book of the Orchard—21 pages of translated material, altogether). To say the least, this is an exhaustive treatment of...

(2002). Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 71-72.