Late Twelfth Century Research Articles

Medieval Arles through the Lives of Its Founding Bishop

Texts recounting the careers of saints were foundational to Christian worship and historical construction in medieval Europe. They were also fluid, living works that evolved over time as individual saints’ stories were revised, adapted, and retold. These texts changed in response to changing contexts in which they were used and understood. This article undertakes a case study to see how the evolution of one urban saint’s legend reflects the history of that saint’s city. Specifically, it analyzes the numerous Latin and vernacular texts produced between the mid-fifth and late twelfth centuries that recount the deeds of Saint Trophimus, first bishop of Arles. It argues that shifts in the saint’s story reflect broad changes in the political, religious, and social life of Arles. It also demonstrates that the number of parties recounting the legend multiplied over time, and that dissonances within the story arose as these groups adapted the tale to their own interests.

Exploring Durrës between East and West: discovery of a protostonepaste—archaeological context and archaeometric analysis

This research delves into the investigation of a ceramic sample discovered in the southern sector of the Durrës Amphitheatre, with a primary focus on comprehending its composition, origin, and cultural importance. The sample reveals similarities with protostonepaste through meticulous chemical analysis, yet a more profound correlation with protostonepaste concerning normative composition. Despite its porcelain-like external appearance, the ceramic demonstrates chemical consistency with a finely balanced amalgamation of crushed kaolinised leucogranite, frits, and talc, accounting for a dominant proportion of 60% compared to the other constituents. Our findings suggest that the ceramic traces its origin to Iran, specifically the Kashan and Qamsar areas, dating back to the twelfth century. The geological attributes of the region have significantly influenced the choice of raw materials for producing high-temperature ceramics. Additionally, the presence of arsenic and cobalt in the glaze further corroborates its Iranian provenance. This discovery significantly accentuates Durrës' pivotal role as a crucial conduit for East–West interactions, including its historical ties with Venice. Trade links between Durrës and Syrian–Iranian area were established as early as the tenth century. Furthermore, the analysed ceramic fragment was unearthed within a layer corresponding to a period of abandonment within the productive context. This period dates to the late twelfth century—early thirteenth century. These findings offer compelling evidence of this urban sector's continued commercial and economic significance throughout the central centuries of the Middle Ages.

Community and Conflict in the Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds

Jocelin of Brakelond's chronicle provides a remarkably detailed account of conflict within the monastic community of Bury St Edmunds over the course of two decades in the late twelfth century, tracing the convent's division into factions following the death of the negligent Abbot Hugh, the controversial election of his successor Samson, and the community's subsequent difficulty negotiating its relationship with him. This article examines the position of conflict within Jocelin's narrative, and argues that it played a fundamental role in shaping the monastic experience by mediating relationships within the convent and between the convent and the abbot.

Rozwój dystryktu miejskiego w średniowieczu na przykładzie niegdysiejszych dóbr biskupstwa miśnieńskiego pod Zgorzelcem

Expansion of municipal jurisdiction in the Middle Ages as exemplified by the former estates of the Bishopric of Meissen near Zgorzelec (Görlitz) In the paper, two questions are raised: concerning the scope of immunity of the estates of the Bishopric of Meissen in eastern Upper Lusatia (so-called Zagozd), and how and when the former estates of the bishopric were absorbed by the judicial district (weichbild) of the town of Görlitz. The status of the bishopric’s estates has been reconstructed as immune from the jurisdiction of worldly powers, also in the field of high (criminal) justice, from at least the mid- or late twelfth century. This status was probably kept by those estates also when they were transferred to the hands of the knights after the decomposition of the domain of the bishopric. The end of the immunity of the former episcopal estates was brought about only by the active enforcement of their own jurisdiction by the townsmen of Görlitz in the 1370s.

Revisiting Female Pilgrimage in Medieval Oxford: Evidence from the Miracula Sancte Frideswide*

The most common form of female pilgrimage in medieval England was local pilgrimage to a saint's shrine. One English pilgrimage destination which is especially associated with women is St Frideswide's shrine in Oxford, owing to a collection of miracle stories compiled in the 1180s in which women are particularly prevalent. Drawing on a new edition and translation of the Miracula sancte Frideswide, this article revisits the cult of Frideswide in the late twelfth century and takes a fresh look at the experiences of women visiting Oxford on pilgrimage. The article reassesses previous speculations about women's attraction to the cult, brings to light some little‐appreciated aspects of female pilgrimage, and finds that many of the accounts challenge assumptions made about female behaviour and expectations in the Middle Ages.

The Genoese Predicament: Christian–Muslim Communication in the Annales Ianuenses (c. 1099–1293)

ABSTRACT Building on research that presents Jews and Muslims as an integral part of Genoese history, this article analyses the development of Genoese–Muslim interaction in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to understand the challenges of interreligious communication in the pre-modern Mediterranean. It treats the Annals of Genoa as a collective psychogramme that provides insight into the commune’s shifting attitudes towards Muslims. While acknowledging the Annals’ obvious biases, the article argues that the multiple authors of this work of historiography faithfully depicted the problems encountered by the Genoese in their communication with Muslim interlocutors from the perspective of those in power. Consequently, the Annals allow us to trace how Genoa established cooperative relations with Muslim-ruled North Africa in the wake of the First Crusade and how it successfully weathered turbulences caused by political shifts in the Mediterranean of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. The Annals suggest that the destabilization of the western Mediterranean and intensifying inner-Christian strife began to jeopardize Genoese communication with Muslim-ruled societies in the 1230s. During the remainder of the thirteenth century, it seems, the commune was torn between different loyalties and thus unable to pursue a coherent communicative approach to Muslim-ruled societies.

Papal communications and historical writing in Angevin England

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of papal communications in historical writing in England under the Angevin kings (1154–1216). Taking the examples of Gervase of Canterbury, Roger of Howden and Herbert of Bosham, it demonstrates a variety of responses to papal communications between the curia and England. By the late twelfth century such communications – particularly papal letters – had become an integral part of the material of historical writing. Some writers included papal letters for the purpose of narration or legitimation. Others were interested in the process of communication itself, while others again used the language and ideas in these letters for their own comments on events. By examining papal communications from an underexplored perspective, we gain insights into how learned and politically engaged men responded to papal interventions in English affairs. Equally, examining how such historians engaged with papal communications reveals aspects of their methods, models and expectations of their audience.

The Making of a Hero and a Villain: Southern Song Literati’s Changing Perceptions of the Memoirs of Li Gang and Wang Boyan

Abstract This article discusses how Southern Song literati’s changing perceptions of the three memoirs of Li Gang 李綱 (1083–1140) and Wang Boyan 汪伯彥 (1069–1141) shaped their posthumous reputations. Both men served as chief councilor in the early Southern Song. Literati in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries became increasingly skeptical of Wang Boyan’s memoir, a work that had been considered as authentic decades earlier. Partly driven by their irredentist passion and their disappointment with autocratic councilors, literati identified with the hawkish Li and supported the printing of his works. After Li’s formerly lesser-known personal memoir had a wider circulation in the thirteenth century, daoxue 道學 historians deliberately adopted his overt criticism of Wang to form a new narrative that praised Li and vilified Wang. The posthumous reputations of the two men went into two extremes as a result—Wang was nefarious while Li was an illustrious minister.

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily

Simon of Tournai's Stroke: The Image of an Irate Unbeliever

For centuries after his death in the late twelfth century, Simon of Tournai, a master of theology in the Parisian schools, had a reputation for being an unbeliever punished by God with a stroke. This article gathers the eight known medieval sources for his stroke and examines them from a mythogenetic perspective to demonstrate how different authors writing with different purposes, genres, and biases recast the image of Simon as an unbeliever for their own moral or polemical programs. I argue that since Simon's stroke was interpreted as divine action, presenting him as sinful was required to preserve divine goodness. The article also discusses the representation of Simon as irate as an element of didactic intent against unbelief, blasphemy, pride, anger, and luxuria. The article revises the date of Simon's stroke from c. 1201 to the 1180s or very early 1190s.

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim, by Martha G. Newman

In studies of the long twelfth century, a handful of individuals—Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St Victor—have long taken centre stage in discussions of theological, intellectual and institutional change. In recent years, however, there has been a shift away from this focus on big-name celebrities towards a greater interest in the careers of local and regional actors, and the manuscripts that they commissioned or produced. Martha Newman’s study of Engelhard of Langheim’s exempla collection, written for a nearby community of Cistercian nuns, is itself an exemplary contribution to this revitalised micro-historical approach, using episodes and themes from Engelhard’s collection as a way of exploring and unpicking some of the key theological, liturgical and intellectual developments of the twelfth century. The first chapter sketches out Engelhard’s place in the world: after the death of his father he entered the Cistercian house of Langheim where, aside from a brief period as abbot at an unnamed house in Austria, he would remain for the rest of his life, participating in the exchange of books and letters with monks and nuns at other houses in the region. Among his correspondents were the nuns of the abbey of Wechterswinkel, for whom he composed a collection of exempla at some point in the late twelfth century.

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim. By Martha Newman

Engelhard of Langheim, the Cistercian monk, may not be a household name—all the more reason then to welcome Martha Newman’s monograph on what she calls Engelhard’s ‘sacramental imagination’, as vividly displayed in the collection of stories he wrote in the late twelfth century for the community of Franconian nuns of Wechterswinkel (a community formally recognized as Cistercian in the early thirteenth century). These are stories which remind us that, strident and powerful though it was, St Bernard’s was but one of the many Cistercian voices to be heard within twelfth-century cloisters. The collection is notable not only for being ‘the earliest extant text that a Cistercian monk dedicated to Cistercian nuns’ (p. 2) but also for the particularities of Engelhard’s imagination. Engelhard confines himself to stories of events he has himself seen or of which he had first-hand knowledge (‘I wrote nothing for which I either did not give or could not give witnesses’, p. 65), but this hardly proves a limitation; Cistercian chapters provided plentiful times when stories could be collected, swapped, and passed on, and it is clear Engelhard knew how to keep his ear to the ground. It is also clear that there were times when, despite his protestations, he could not resist the odd embellishment, since, as he himself admits, ‘this is allowed to writers’ (p. 62).

Nicholas Karn. Kings, Lords and Courts in Anglo-Norman England.

The Anglo-Norman period, which stretches from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the accession of Henry II in 1154, occupies a difficult place in English legal history. It is unhelpful that its source base is more intractable than those of either the preceding or the following eras, not providing even the semblance of a clear account of how law worked. Yet the period’s unyielding sources have pressing questions to answer because profound differences between the periods show that Anglo-Norman England witnessed fundamental legal change. It is not fair to say that the Anglo-Norman legal world has been neglected, but it is rare for a book-length study to take England’s early medieval legal inheritance seriously and wrestle with the problem of how it transformed to produce the more familiar world of the late twelfth century. This is what Nicholas Karn’s Kings, Lords and Courts in Anglo-Norman England does with remarkable success. It is one of those rare books that appreciably advances historical knowledge on a well-worn topic.

Mine Air Makes Free? Rural Liberty, Materiality, and Agency in Europe’s Long Thirteenth Century

Abstract Mines and miners began to proliferate in Europe from the late twelfth century on, in lockstep with the region’s accelerating economic integration and urbanization. Mining communities were often rural and remote, reflecting landlords’ capacity to attract workers through freedoms that echoed the era’s incentives for urban migration. If, according to the adage, “city air makes free,” so apparently did the mine. Yet the specific affordances of mines’ materiality, and the mobility regimes they fostered, shaped distinct social dynamics. These emerge in their complexity when mining ordinances—a new type of legal subgenre—are explored for their handling of matter and movement. Mining legislation attests that the composition of ores, the underground extension of seams, the quality of available tools, and the behavior of gas, water, and air across different topographies were salient factors over which elites had little control. The raw physical constraints on directing the flow of people and matter into, through, and out of mines thus created a network of subterranean agency that translated under certain conditions into exterranean power.

The Old Norse–Icelandic Hagiography of St Ambrose of Milan: Manuscript Tradition, Sources, and Composition

The Old Norse–Icelandic Hagiography of St Ambrose of Milan: Manuscript Tradition, Sources, and Composition

Ecological Impacts and Environmental Perceptions of Mining in Europe, 1200–1550: Preliminary Notes

Abstract: The proliferation of mines in Europe since the late twelfth century is well documented, but only recently have scholars begun to fathom the scale of the industry’s ecological impact, on the one hand, and its role in stimulating environmental thinking and action, on the other. Focusing on the extraction and processing of metal ores, this article begins by illustrating how the renascent sector reshaped different ecosystems, as traced by several palaeo-scientific methods. It then turns to cultural-historical sources to propose that, rather than becoming passive, unwilling, or ignorant victims of a polluting industry, contemporaries criticised what they perceived as extraction’s harms and sought to reduce them, but also developed ways to justify their risks. Communities’ actions, which mingled with the materiality of mines and their surroundings, wrote a major chapter in Europe’s environmental history, one whose ongoing impact remains poorly understood.

Papal Attitudes to Truces and Alliances between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries

Pope Celestine III (1191–98) condemned both truces and alliances between Christian and Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula, but Innocent III (1198–1216) was more ready to allow and even encourage truces. Papal action was influenced by various factors. The popes’ interventions were dependent on the receipt of reports and petitions from the Peninsula, and Spanish rulers sought to manipulate the papacy in order to achieve their own ends. The two popes also had different crusading priorities. These matters do not, however, fully explain their differing approach. Innocent was more of a pragmatist than his predecessor, and was possibly also influenced by the views of decretists. Yet a more wide-ranging study, which takes account of varying circumstances, is needed before generalisations can be made about papal attitudes to truces and alliances with non-Christians.

Monks and the Muslim Enemy: Conversion, Polemic and Resistance in Monastic Hagiography in the Age of the Crusades, c. 1000–1250

AbstractAlthough most accounts of Christian encounters with Muslims in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries pay particular attention to conflict and violence, a body of hagiographical texts emanating from monastic circles points to a different kind of approach. In this article I foreground three examples of Italo-Greek saints’ lives from the tenth and early eleventh centuries in which the saints in question treat Muslims whom they encounter as potential converts, and explain to them the tenets of Christian theology. These texts are examined as precursors of the Cluniac ‘dossier’ compiled about Abbot Maiolus's encounter with Muslims in the 990s. Two of the three saints’ lives were translated from Greek into Latin, one in the late eleventh, the other in the late twelfth century. The motives for and circumstances of these translations are discussed in light of growing hostility towards the Islamic world during the period of the crusades.

Revealing the Miraculous: Objects Placed inside the Statue of the Kōfukuji Nan’endō Fukūkenjaku Kannon

The use of relics and gorintō (five-element pagodas) as objects placed in Buddhist statues gained currency in the late twelfth century. This article examines the deposits (nōnyūhin) placed by Fujiwara no Kanezane (1149–1207) in 1189 within the statue of Fukūkenjaku Kannon in the Nan’endō at Kōfukuji in Nara, one of the earliest examples to contain both relics and gorintō. The article unravels the intricate relationship between the contents of the inserted objects, the meaning of the statue, and the motives behind the placing of the deposits. On the one hand, the deposits in this statue were carefully selected to manifest Kanezane’s conception of the sacred. On the other, they were intended to evoke a response from Fukūkenjaku Kannon to generate rebirth in Amida’s pure land. The relic deposit was enshrined because of its connection to Pure Land rebirth and was to transform the statue into a shōjinbutsu (living buddha) that assumed an array of meanings: an icon containing relics, a nexus for salvation, and a miraculous manifestation of the deity. It is also suggested that Pure Land belief was a driving force behind the increase in using relics as nōnyūhin in the late twelfth century.

An Absence of Time: Remarks on the Temporal Mode of Being in Royal Elamite Inscriptions

The surviving royal inscriptions from ancient Elam (in the south and southwest of modern Iran) speak of two historical characters who occupy particular positions outside physical time. These are Šilhaha (probably active in the early nineteenth century BC) and Princess Bar-Uli (in the second half of the twelfth century BC). Šilhaha became a prominent figure in Elamite history. His position is known through a legitimizing formula used by several subsequent rulers who claimed to be the ‘son of Šilhaha’s sister’. Thus, Šilhaha became a sempiternal being as his metaphysical existence was necessary for all the future kings who would make such a claim. However, his temporal mode of being changed from sempiternal to omnitemporal when he appeared in a curse formulated in the late twelfth century BC. In this curse, Šilhaha occupies a divine position. To appear in such a position means that his metaphysical existence would become necessary for the future both within and outside physical time. As for B/Par-Uli, she is called the ‘beloved daughter’ and ‘salvation’ of King Šilhak-Inšušinak I (conventionally 1150-1120 BC). Being her father’s ‘salvation’ denotes her role in this world and the hereafter. Moreover, her image, engraved in a mirror-like scene on a chalcedony bead, further emphasises her position and role. Drawing on the terms ‘temporal’, ‘sempiternal’ and ‘omnitemporal’, this paper examines the textual contexts to see how the shift in the temporal modes of being occurred. In the end, the image on the chalcedony bead will be briefly discussed.