Late Medieval Europe Research Articles

Salmo salar in late medieval Scotland: competition and conservation for a riverine resource

Across the western and northern European range of diadromous Salmo salar (Atlantic salmon) during the Middle Ages (ca.500–ca.1500 CE), this fish was a highly prized object of elite human consumption, of intense seasonal fishing, of human competition, and, by the 1200s, a victim of evident depletion. What, then, enabled long traditional riverine fisheries in Scotland to become a major export producer in late medieval centuries? Provisional survey of published written records, some archival collections, and archaeological evidence establishes the great value Scottish kings and landowners placed on salmon fishing sites and their product. Knowledgeable workers for the holders of fishing rights caught salmon especially with beach seines and fixed weirs. Their catch went to elite households and urban markets for domestic consumption and was especially from the late 1300s packed in barrels for export to regions around the North Sea where diminished native runs failed to meet rising demand. Medieval Scots competed for the right to catch their salmon but did not complain that those catches were shrinking. From about 1200 royal judgments and by the early 1300s parliamentary legislation placed Scottish salmon fisheries under public regulation, prohibiting fishing at certain times and seasons and requiring all gear to permit passage of pre-migrant juveniles. Early imposition in Scotland of these limits to private fishing rights as well as an agrarian regime that (unintentionally) minimized barriers to migrants and preserved headwater spawning habitats may help explain the apparently greater sustainability of salmon stocks in Scotland than elsewhere in late medieval Europe.

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe by Michael D. Bailey (review)

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe by Michael D. Bailey (review)

:Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe

:<i>Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe</i>

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe, by Michael D. Bailey

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe, by Michael D. Bailey

“In Things”: The Rebus in Premodern Devotion

A hybrid of letters and pictures arranged to signify a sentence or phrase, the rebus transforms objects into ideas more explicitly than any other kind of communicative system. Its fundamental mechanism of representation enacts a connection between words and things and evokes the ways in which ideas, when inscribed in letters, are necessarily grounded in physical reality. Although the rebus is usually considered a light and popular form, its playful mixture of ideas and things is also used to negotiate sacred meaning, and even to embody the divine. This essay explores the multiple signifying strategies of the rebus in late medieval and early modern Europe, focusing especially on its surprising potential for devotional expression. Combining both objects and words offers readers in this complicated moment of cultural and theological change a powerful way to approach the depiction of God, and also to articulate the contours of the devotional self.

Book review: Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, written by Marianna G. Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo

Book review: Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, written by Marianna G. Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo

The supernatural voice: a history of high male singing

The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state of flux. To this end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys' voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom he has performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still regularly contributes.

Information asymmetry and the speed of adjustment: debasements in the mid‐sixteenth century

This article examines the impact of information asymmetry on the movement of London–Antwerp exchange rates against the backdrop of the Great Debasement of 1544–51. The case of the revaluation of gold coins in the Habsburg Netherlands in 1539, about which the sovereign and the public possessed similar information, is used as the benchmark to judge how far the speed of adjustment was affected by information asymmetry. This article is also part of the recent literature that estimates the degree of financial market integration in late medieval and early modern Europe. In the framework of the threshold autoregressive model, the speed of adjustment and the transaction costs associated with arbitrage are estimated, and the results are judged using the speed of communication as a benchmark since the flow of information played a critical role in financial arbitrage. The results reveal that the sixteenth‐century London–Antwerp exchange markets were already as integrated as that during the late nineteenth century, but information asymmetry severely disturbed the effectiveness of exchange arbitrage.

Marianna G. Muravyeva and Raisa M. Toivo, eds, Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Marianna G. Muravyeva and Raisa M. Toivo, eds, <i>Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe</i>

Michael D. Bailey: Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013; pp. xv + 295.

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 151-152 BOOK REVIEW Bailey, Michael D.: Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013; pp. xv + 295. Nicholas D. Brodie, Nicholas D. Brodie University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this author Nicholas D. Brodie, Nicholas D. Brodie University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12230Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume39, Issue1March 2015Pages 151-152 RelatedInformation

Marc Boone &amp; Martha C. Howell (eds.), The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries

Marc Boone &amp; Martha C. Howell (eds.), The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries

Living Stones

This article investigates the metaphor of the “living house” and its concrete ramifications on everyday life in late medieval and early modern Europe. For premodern Europeans, the house was an actor that occupied an important and natural role in their social life and in the urban space in which they lived. Human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. This article examines the historical origins of this metaphor and why it became particularly powerful in the early modern period. The author then surveys the various expressions of the anthropomorphic understanding of the house, as reflected both in the architectural theory and the popular discourse of the time. The final part addresses the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.

La risposta di Venezia alla rivolta di San Tito a Creta (1363-1366) : un delitto di lesa maestà?

Our contribution is about the judicial interpretation of a serious revolution exploded in Candia in 1363. In the august of the same year, many Venetian patricians and colonists deposed the Duke of Crete in charge and proclaimed independence from Venice. The homeland - shocked by the attack at the heart of its power - tried to come to terms with the rebels, but once Venice became aware of their will in persisting to be mutinous, decided to counter attack, accused the rebels to attempt to its majesty, proclaimed the insurgents heretics and fought against them. The judicial language used by Venetian authorities is centered around some categories and cases in point which referred to a specific kind of crime in late Medieval Europe : the crimen lese maiestatis. The most interesting fact, that we output in our contribution, is that these categories substituted the expression crimen lese maietstais. In particular, the terms proditio and rebellio, were used by Venetians in order to connote the crime committed : the refuse of the obedience to the political authority. During our contribution, the Cretan revolt has been compared to two others serious rebellions which upset the political life in Venice : the conspiracy of Baiamonte Tiepolo and Marco Querini and the coup d’état planned by the doge Marino Falier. In this way the law system and justice were used by Venice as flexible elements to create consent and to legitimate its power.

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Historical sources documenting recurrent plagues of the “Second Pandemic” usually focus on urban epidemic mortality. Instead, plague persists in remote, rural hinterlands: areas less visible in the written sources of late medieval Europe. Plague spreads as fleas move from relatively resistant rodents, which serve as “maintenance hosts,” to an array of more susceptible rural mammals, now called “amplifying hosts.” Using sources relevant to plague in thinly populated Central and Western Alpine regions, this paper postulates that Alpine Europe could have been a region of plague persistence via its population of wild rodents, particularly the Alpine marmot.

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. By Michael D. Bailey. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. xv + 296 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe . By Michael D. Bailey . Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2013. xv + 296 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is a well-planned and clearly-written book on an important subject: the ways in which theologians and other intellectuals defined in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Michael Bailey's main title may be confusing and impenetrable, but his subtitle, pointing to the boundaries of superstition, is apt and precise.The book's introduction, setting out the relational nature of the term and outlining its changing meanings, will be valuable for students, and remains thought-provoking for more advanced scholars. Briefly, the argument is that superstition was defined in terms of what it was not; in this period it was mostly not-religion, but occasionally it could be not-science, as it usually has been in times. Related terms are unpacked with care: magic, science, religion, and as well as more specialized terms like witchcraft, divination, and necromancy.Bailey's sources are mainly theological texts, and he has ranged widely in his search for them. His eleven-page appendix of texts is a feat of scholarship, discussing location, authorship, and dating of each text, and citing important printed editions, either contemporary, near contemporary, or modern. Many texts remain in manuscript. Most are from France and Germany; Bailey largely excludes the region south of the Alps for unexplained reasons (17). Perhaps as a result, there is little in the book about the Renaissance; Bailey's own concerns are very much medieval, and he worries (perhaps overmuch) about the shadow cast by Johan Huizinga.The book's structure is simple enough. Chapter 1 deals with the millennium or so before 1300, in largely narrative mode, and Chapters 2 and 3 continue the narrative, in much more detail, to about 1400. There is then a bifurcation. Chapters 4 and 5 both cover the fifteenth century, but Chapter 4 is largely thematic, discussing a large number of writings worrying about popular superstition. Chapter 5 discusses the century's witchcraft writings, culminating in the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486. These demonological writings have been studied from numerous angles, but Bailey finds a fresh line of approach, focusing on what they said about how to counteract witchcraft. Was it legitimate to counter demonic hailstorms by casting hailstones into a fire in the name of the Holy Trinity? The Malleus argued that it was (218).The concluding chapter is Towards Disenchantment? This looks forward to times. Bailey reviews the debate on and disenchantment, outlines changes in the concept of since 1500, and seeks (perhaps over-ambitiously) to argue that his late medieval writers have something distinct to contribute to the debate. These different purposes are not always signposted clearly, particularly when it comes to rationality, and Bailey's problematizing of modernity may lead unwary students into simplistic generalizations. There is a passage (248-249) that could lead them to conclude that late-medieval theologians were as modern as we are because they used rational argument-though Bailey himself, of course, says nothing as crude as that. …

Review: Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention by Roger Stalley, ed.

Roger Stalley, ed. Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention Dublin: Wordwell, 2012, 226 pp., 75 color and 75 b/w illus. €29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781905569700 The marginalization of the study of late medieval architecture in Ireland results from a series of coincidences, including the treatment of Ireland as peripheral to mainstream European developments; the perception of the Gothic style as a foreign imposition when compared to indigenous forms of earlier eras; the relative unfamiliarity of scholars outside Ireland with the complexities of Irish history; and the limited scale of Irish Gothic construction in a discipline that has traditionally prized technological achievement. In the past, architectural historians structured the field to elevate the great French cathedrals as the standard for Gothic form and meaning, but the spread and popularity of Gothic design elements throughout late medieval Europe in innumerably varied circumstances mean that most Gothic deviates from the “rule.” Recent scholarship—for example, Colum Hourihane’s survey of late medieval artistic production, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550 (2003)—has attempted to reassess the situation, but the subject of Gothic architecture in Ireland still provides much to explore.1 Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention contributes to that process of exploration. The volume was produced by a team affiliated with the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, and its title implies a survey, but the book is a series of connected studies that follow the erection and subsequent fate of Gothic buildings on Irish soil. The authors have the stated intention of producing a multifaceted study of Gothic, incorporating ideas of reception and postmedieval change. The consideration of the longue duree as it relates to buildings has become a useful methodology for scholars of medieval architecture in recent years, but given the political and religious oppression in Ireland since the Middle Ages, Irish buildings can assume charged but shifting symbolic functions that make this approach particularly fruitful here. Roger Stalley’s introduction provides a historiographical grounding …

Joan Cadden. Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe.

Joan Cadden. Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe.

Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe by Joan Cadden (review)

Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe by Joan Cadden (review)

Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe ed. by Marianna G. Muravyeva, Raisa Maria Toivo (review)

Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe ed. by Marianna G. Muravyeva, Raisa Maria Toivo (review)

Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst by Krzysztof Bracha (review)

Reviewed by: Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst by Krzysztof Bracha Michael D. Bailey KEY WORDS Krzysztof Bracha, Nikolaus Magni, Reformation Theology, superstition, late medieval belief, Nikolaus Magni von Jauer, De superstitionibus Krzysztof Bracha. Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst. Trans. Peter Chmiel. Quellen und Forschungen zur Europäischen Ethnologie 25 . Dettelbach: J. H. Röll, 2013. Pp. 272. Late medieval superstition has received a fair amount of attention recently. In 2010, Euan Cameron’s expansive Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 considered it at some length before moving on to later periods, and in 2013 my own Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe dealt with it exclusively. Krzysztof Bracha’s detailed study of a single late medieval author and a major (arguably the major) late medieval treatise on superstition is both the latest and also earliest important study in this area. The book is a German translation and updating of Bracha’s 1999 Polish publication Teolog, diabel i zabobony:Świadectwo traktatu Mikolaja Magni z Jawora De superstitionibus (1405 r.). In the intervening years, he has produced a number of valuable articles on superstition, several in German and a few in English, but it is wonderful to have his major study finally made available in a language that far more Western European and American scholars will be able to read. Nikolaus Magni was born in Jawor (German: Jauer) in what is now Polish Silesia around 1355. He studied and then taught at the University of Prague for over two decades, until he moved to the University of Heidelberg in 1402. He was an important theologian and academic leader at both institutions, and his movements to some extent illustrate the lines of intellectual connection and influence that criss-crossed Central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, stretching from Prague, Krakow, and Vienna in the east to Cologne and Heidelberg in the west. The first part of Bracha’s book consists of two substantial chapters that trace Nikolaus’s life and career and situate him and his work in the context of late medieval efforts to promote religious reform among both the clergy and laity. Also in Part I is a shorter, more technical chapter detailing the origins and manuscript circulation of his great work De superstitionibus. The second part of the book examines that treatise in detail, with five chapters grouped around major aspects of superstition that it addressed. [End Page 224] As Bracha readily admits, the importance of this treatise does not lie in any great originality on its part. On almost every point, Nikolaus relied on standard patristic and scholastic authorities like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and William of Auvergne. What distinguishes his work is its encyclopedic nature and its astonishing circulation. More than a century ago (in the only other book-length study of Nikolaus), Adolph Franz identified 58 surviving manuscript copies of De superstitionibus, an enormous number for a theological treatise (Magister Nikolaus Magni de Jawor [1898]). Bracha has expanded this list by almost 100 additional manuscripts, bringing the total count to 152, listed in an appendix. Almost all of these manuscripts originated in Central Europe, meaning that Nikolaus’s influence was somewhat confined geographically, but it was all the more intense for that concentration. Also remarkable is that his influence basically did not extend past the fifteenth century, nor did his treatise ever find its way into print. I will return to this point below. Bracha’s book performs two important tasks that should give it a resonance beyond what its seemingly narrow focus might promise. First, in Part I, it provides a short but valuable study of Central European intellectual and religious currents through the lens of a major but now little-remembered and understudied figure. Then, in Part II, it presents a detailed exploration of late medieval superstition via the most extensive and widely circulated Central European exemplar of an antisuperstition treatise. Precisely because Nikolaus Magni was not startlingly original on any point, Bracha’s study gives background information...