Late Twelfth Century Research Articles

Passion Relics and the Medieval Imagination: Art, Architecture, and Society

Passion Relics and the Medieval Imagination: Art, Architecture, and Society

The Impact of Southern Song Buddhism on the Japanese Pure Land Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Shinran’s Thought in the Context of Sino-Japanese Buddhist Exchange

This article discusses how Southern Song Buddhism, which flourished in the Taizhou 台州, Hangzhou 杭州 and Ningbo 寧波 area, positively impacted the transformational movement of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Recently, several excellent academic books were published in Japan that address the development of Buddhist thought during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960) and Song periods (960-1279) and Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchange from the perspective of cultural and textual relationships across East Asian during this era. These studies reveal the trans-sectarian and trans-national characteristics of Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchange during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These studies demonstrate not only cutting-edge methodological approaches by modern scholars, but also why comprehensive research of and knowledge about transformational Japanese Buddhist movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is necessary for understanding the history of the development of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism.<BR> In this article, I overview the impact of Southern Song Buddhism on the development of Japanese Buddhism, especially the transformational movement of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focusing on Shinran 親鸞 (1173-1263), who is the founder of Jōdo Shinshū or Shin Buddhist sect. He was one of the main figures of the transform movement of Japanese Pure Land in the thirteenth century. Shinran is also recognized as a seminal, sophisticated religious thinker in Japanese Buddhism, and he is remembered in modern times for his provocative and insightful writings. Here, I examine his main work, the Ken Jōdoshinjitsu Kyōgyōshō monrui 顕浄土真実教行証文類 (Collected Passages Revealing the True Teaching, Practice, and Realization; hereafter The True Teaching, Practice, and Realization) and analyze how Song-dynasty Buddhist texts, especially written by masters in the Hangzhou area brought back to Japan during this time, greatly impacted Shinran’s innovative and transformational thought.

Papal–Hungarian relations in the late twelfth century

The one the most important accelerators of the development of the military-religious orders was the series of privileges they got hold of from the 1130s onwards. The privileges exempted the orders from the novalia and labores-tithe as well as these provided burial rights and alike. Similar to the Western European situation, these privileges led to a tension with the local clergy which manifested by the Third Lateran Council in 1179. The papal privileges given to the Templars and Hospitallers settled in the Kingdom of Hungary clearly reflect on this situation.

Under the Mediterranean I: Studies in Maritime Archaeology

Under the Mediterranean I: Studies in Maritime Archaeology

Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera

Reviewed by: Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera Catherine Bates Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics. By Rocío G. Sumillera. Cambridge: Legenda. 2019. x+159 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781883–20–4. Keeping good company with the current surge of interest in Renaissance poetics, this meticulously researched and useful book shows how the concept of 'invention' undergoes a critical development during the early modern period. Through a series of carefully marshalled arguments and extensively illustrated examples, Rocío Sumillera convincingly demonstrates that the 'conceptual richness' (pp. 2, 125) of Renaissance inventio results from its intermediary position between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and Romanticism, on the other. While referring widely to Italian, French, and Spanish sources, Sumillera focuses specifically on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England to trace the evolution of this critical concept, as it shifts from being a functional term in classical logic and rhetoric to assuming much wider connotations of artistic originality and creativity. Key to this development is the change from invention as a form of finding (from in +venire, literally 'to come upon') to invention as a form of devising, making, or creating. To explore how and when this change takes place, Sumillera considers inventionʼs relation to imitation and imagination, respectively. With their origins in Plato and Aristotle, theories of imitation have always struggled with the question of ideality—whether the object imitated or the imitation itself might be in some way exemplary—and this problem comes to the fore when the object being imitated is another author. While there is little dignity in slavish copying, imitatio assumes an altogether more 'inventive form' (p. 49) when—differentiated as aemulatio—it aims to alter, personalize, and surpass the original. As for theories of the imagination—although originating in the quite different discipline of natural philosophy and associated there with questions of perception and cognition—the 'image-making faculty' was similarly understood to work with both 'what had already been experienced' and 'new realities never even perceived' (p. 111): in other words, to be capable of producing something potentially better and new. The idea that a human artist might create something out of nothing—surpassing not only literary forebears but nature herself in 'making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew', as Philip Sidney puts it in the Defence of Poesy—was alien to the Greeks; for the polytheistic societies of antiquity saw the gods or Muses as sources of inspiration rather than as the single, ideal, creator God of Christianity in whom the human artist might find the ultimate model, 'the heavenly Maker of that maker' (Sidney, again). It was in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, interestingly enough—when scholastic Christianity was at the [End Page 278] height of its reach and power—that the notion of inventio first entered the field of poetics: through the poetic treatises of men such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, and through the medieval artes poetriae that taught the principles of composition and interpretation (that is, the writing and reading of literary texts). By the same token, however, in exercising a creative power more properly deemed divine, the human artist ran the risk of presumption if not of sacrilege and blasphemy, which is why such creativity also roused strong opposition (especially among the Calvinists, with their emphasis on human depravity): an anti-poetic sentiment that was to feature particularly strongly in the English Reformation. All in all, this is a detailed yet wide-ranging scholarly book that will serve students and scholars equally well. Although its focus is English Renaissance poetics, the breadth of reference to European sources gives this study a notable ballast and breadth. Sumillera is particularly adept at the selection and presentation of primary quotations, finding the perfect examples—and plenty of them—to illustrate her argument. This makes the book a great resource, as well as a pleasure to read. Catherine Bates University of Warwick Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Dancing Returns: Recovering Modernism’s Movements

Dancing Returns: Recovering Modernism’s Movements Michelle Clayton (bio) In the fall of 2016, as performers rehearsed for an exhibition by choreographer-artist Tino Sehgal at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, the walls were literally coming down around them.1 In Sehgal’s previous retrospectives, such as the one mounted at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau in the summer of 2015, visitors had moved through separated, often pitch-black spaces, orienting themselves around invisible bodies who announced their presence in individual outbursts or erupted, unsettlingly, in collective humming. But for the Palais de Tokyo, for a piece titled “These Associations,” Sehgal wanted to open up the central space, to set his moving mass of performers —an international, cross-generational group of dancers, writers, sociologists, and travel agents—roaming around the ground floor, intermingling with one another and with visitors, singing, sprinting, and playing games. For that to happen, the walls had to come down.2 The goal was transparency: making all visible to one another—performers, publics, curators, the artist—in the hope that, as all moved around one another and around the exploded exhibition space, new vantage points, new associations would continually come into view. I was a participant in “These Associations”: officially as a performer, inevitably as a researcher, occasionally as a visitor, moving with the memory of what it felt like to visit earlier exhibitions by Sehgal.3 Participating in the piece offered an unusual opportunity to see the assemblage of a work from the inside, to take part in its development and feel its duration; over three-hour shifts and a three-month run, it afforded numerous insights into the relation between bodies occupying the same space from different and fluid subject positions. And as it coincided with the beginning [End Page 307] of a year of archival research into dance from a century earlier, the experience began to give shape to questions I would grapple with in my own scholarly work. What is the relationship between dance and architecture, its sites of choreography, performance, storage, and/or retrieval? How does the body of the spectator or scholar participate in experiments in recovery or reanimation? How do we go in search of bodies from the past, in museums, theaters, and libraries, and how do we bring those bodies to life, in performances, exhibitions, and writing? Finally, how do we recount the performances that weren’t recorded, but that left traces in and on the bodies that performed or viewed them?4 These questions have been at the center of critical discussion and creative practice among performers and publics alike over the last decade, as museums, libraries, theaters, and media platforms have begun staging new approaches to modernism, recoveries of modernist dance, and/or—in an intriguing overlap—danced recoveries of modernism. In what follows I will unpack a series of encounters that try out forms of embodied engagement with the past—what I am here calling “dancing returns.” Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. After-image of Israel Galván’s performance in Leuven’s Central Library, November 17, 2016. [End Page 308] Dancing Libraries We begin with a photograph from the end of an evening in November 2016 (fig. 1). The photo shows part of the main reading room of the Central Library of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium: a library built in 1636 in imitation of Italian models, gutted and pillaged in 1797 by French occupiers, burned to the ground by German soldiers in 1914, built anew with donations from British and American libraries in the 1920s, destroyed once again by shelling in 1940, then reconstructed after war’s end according to its 1920s instantiation, the form in which it now lives on. That 1920s form was designed by the US architect Whitney Warren, a specialist in neo-Renaissance buildings who had spent ten years studying in Paris, and who was also inspired by Spanish architecture. The library therefore incorporated a clocktower modeled on the Giralda of Seville, which itself had been commissioned in the late twelfth century to adorn the Great Mosque of the Almohad dynasty, was modified by the addition of a Renaissance-style bell enclosure after...

Byland Abbey: Using the Dead to Bringa Medieval Monastery to Life

ABSTRACT The twelve ghost stories written by a monk at Byland Abbey, North Yorkshire, around 1400 CE have received extensive comment by scholars of medieval ghost stories and the supernatural. Public interpretation of the site, which has been in State care since 1921, has largely focused on the acknowledged importance of Byland's buildings in the development of Cistercian architecture in the British Isles in the late twelfth century. With a strong architectural focus, Byland's English Heritage guidebook makes no mention of the stories or indeed medieval beliefs about death, the afterlife, and the supernatural. This article aims to demonstrate that the ghost stories, together with the architectural, artifactual, and documentary evidence pertaining to monastic beliefs and observance about death, burial, and spiritual salvation, are in fact key to the interpretation of Byland—indeed, to all medieval monasteries—for twenty-first-century visitors.

The Mount Sinai Monastery: A Successful Example of Shared Holy Space

ABSTRACT Mount Sinai had already been a site of the veneration of Moses for two centuries when Emperor Justinian founded a monastery on the site of the Burning Bush in the sixth century. Subsequently the site attracted worship from Muslims as well as Christians after the Arab conquest of Sinai, but although a mosque was built there the monastery remained protected under successive Muslim regimes. From the late twelfth century onward the monastery was also visited by western pilgrims, who identified Mount Sinai as the burial place of St Catherine, venerated her shrine and collected miraculous oil from her bones. Devotion to St Catherine eclipsed the biblical significance of the site in the medieval West, but by the end of the Middle Ages the Latin authorities were frustrated by the reluctance of the monks of Mount Sinai to recognize papal authority, and worship by Latins at the monastery became subject to restrictions.

Psychology and Ethical Epistemology

We examine a hitherto unstudied debate, turning on the epistemology of value judgements, between Ashʿarīs and Baṣran Muʿtazilīs of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī countered Muʿtazilī ethical realism, here defended by al-Malāḥimī, by developing an emotive subjectivism underpinned by increasingly sophisticated psychological accounts of ethical motivation. Value judgements, they maintained, arise not from knowledge of some ethical attributes of acts themselves, but from subjective inclinations, which are often elusive because they can be unconscious or indirect. We also argue against the widespread notion that Ashʿarīs espoused an anti-rationalist ethics, and we show that they were not only ethical rationalists, but also the more innovative side in this debate.

Revisiting the Bylas Phase: An Analysis of Trends and Historical Processes Within the San Carlos Safford Area of Southeastern Arizona During the Late Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Johnson and Wasley's ([1966] Archaeological Excavations Near Bylas, Arizona. Kiva 31(4):205–253) Bylas phase was the basis of a chronological framework the prehistory of the San Carlos Safford Area (SCSA). However, we note limited revision of the phase despite new archaeological data from recent investigations. We evaluate the Bylas phase and analyze chronology, settlement distribution, site structure, ceramic production and acquisition, subsistence, and mortuary patterns. Therefore, we revise Bylas phase chronology, specify four ceramic production zones, identify a mortuary pattern, delineate the nature and extent of occupancy and subsistence, and finally suggest dynamic changes in social organization and demography. We hypothesize many of these shifts, including conflict and district wide depopulation, relate to the emergence of a managerial elite class and repeated immigration from outside the SCSA during the Bylas phase before terminating with the arrival of northern groups at the onset of the Goat Hill phase.

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell

Reviewed by: Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell Brian Steininger (bio) Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre. By Erin L. Brightwell. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. xiv, 322 pages. $60.00. An anonymous traveler to the temple Unrin'in north of Heian-kyō encounters a trio of uncanny elders. One of them, called Yotsugi, claims to be 190 years old and offers a narrative determined to explain the multigenerational twists of fate that resulted in the glorious hegemony of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1028), beginning from events in the mid-ninth century and extending to a present moment just before Michinaga's death. This is a "tale" (monogatari) of Yotsugi—that is both Yotsugi the narrator and yo-tsugi (lineage)—and was labeled as such, but by the twelfth century another name for the work began to circulate in parallel: Ōkagami (The great mirror). In the ensuing years, a string of successors followed: the preface to Masukagami (circa 1368–75) mentions Imakagami (1174–75), covering circa 1025–1170, and Mizukagami (late twelfth century), covering from the legendary Emperor Jinmu through 850 (as well as a now-lost work, Iyayotsugi, which may have focused on the late twelfth century). At the same time, other Mirrors were appearing as well. Kara kagami (mid-thirteenth century) provides a grammar-school overview of major historical figures across Chinese history, while Azuma kagami (circa 1290s) is an official record of the Kamakura shogunate. Reflecting the Past takes as its project the tracing of "the Mirror genre." Its most important intervention lies in proposing the latter as a historically meaningful category: many of the works Erin Brightwell examines have rarely or never been discussed together before and in mainstream scholarship are divided into quite different genres (vernacular history, official chronicle, anecdote collection, and even poetic treatise). Brightwell slips between several types of generic definition over the course of the study, and this diffuseness ultimately limits the force of her case for understanding Mirrors (kagamimono) as a genre. However, the originality of the approach produces a host of startling juxtapositions and trenchant questions that will stimulate and challenge any scholar of the medieval period. After an introduction that contextualizes the Mirrors within a larger opposition between tales and chronicles, chapter 1 presents a double origin for the genre: an ambivalent progenitor in Ōkagami, whose employment of [End Page 187] the tale form and insistence on karmic principles are retrospectively read and systematized in its sequel, Imakagami. The remaining chapters focus on post-Heian innovations and reactions. Chapter 2 turns to Mizukagami; for Brightwell, both this work and the preceding Imakagami are defined by the violent context of the great wars of the twelfth century. Where Ima kagami attempts to validate a "recuperative" historical order (p. 51), the later Mizukagami resorts to the normalization of cyclical violence (p. 111). Chapter 3 focuses on Kara kagami, the culmination of a wave of works in the late twelfth through mid-thirteenth centuries that sought to vernacularize (if not popularize) the historical and literary lore of Chinese tradition (including Kara monogatari, Minamoto no Mitsuyuki's waka sequences, and Sugawara no Tamenaga's translation of Zhenguan zhengyao). This work is undoubtedly the most understudied of the Mirrors Brightwell examines, and the chapter will be correspondingly eye-opening for anyone interested in the intellectual world of the thirteenth century. The focus of chapter 4, Azuma kagami, has by contrast been studied intensively by historians of the Kamakura shogunate though largely ignored by literature scholars. Here Brightwell offers an intriguing reading of this work as a mode of historiography of the "institution" necessitated by the abandonment of court-centered traditions of authority (as well as a detour into Nomori no kagami, a contemporary treatise on waka poetics). The final chapter takes up Masukagami, the last of the traditional "Four Mirrors" (Ōkagami, Imakagami, Mizukagami, Masukagami), alongside the less well-known Shinmeikyō, another fourteenth-century work that narrates the imperial bloodline from Jinmu down to the present. Brightwell sees these works as essentially trapped in a genre that had become moribund as its claims to reliability lost purchase...

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space E. L. Risden The focused, confined narrative form of Marie de France's late-twelfth century Lais allows for interesting concentration on a limited number of spaces. We might expect a medieval author to direct attention pretty clearly to a thematic purpose and to use spatiality to enhance that purpose; Marie did exactly that. Each lai/story uses space, especially a comparison of open and confined spaces, to enhance a moral purpose, and the collection as a whole exploits space to take a specifically spiritual turn at its conclusion. The medieval context of spatiality is interesting in itself. The imaginary Middle Ages often relies on dungeons and castles as common motifs, but the most significant "spaces" historically may instead be cathedrals, architectural marvels and normally centers of their community. Frederick Artz notes in The Mind of the Middle Ages that "[t]o support the vaulting above, the [Romanesque] walls had to be heavy . . . and the isles had to be narrow" yielding "dark interiors . . . pierced only with small windows."1 Artz adds that the "great churches" had attached monasteries that were "great centers of learning and craftsmanship" and "exchanged with other monastic centers": enclosed spaces in themselves, they opened connections in the larger world. The Gothic approach that followed, however, finding more means for expansiveness and the introduction of light to the interior, modified "the whole structure and feeling of [a] church."2 The movement from the darker and more enclosed Romanesque architecture to the brighter, more airy and expansive Gothic style echoes the time's growing cosmology. While Dante used an earth-centered universe, the Commedia at least has a global earth with an expansive Empyrean (though of course it focuses on God); Dante's world offered growing opportunities for individuals to travel imaginatively and in fact beyond the environs of their own birthplace. [End Page 65] Medieval literature kept also an interest in small places—see for instance Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), accounts of or for anchoresses, where the hermetic cell represents an ideal of detachment from the world and absorption in prayer and devotion. In such cases the spatial limitation comes from a religious choice, not from someone else's imposition, with a goal of reaching the ultimate spiritual expansion in Salvation. We can contrast hermetic works with Margery Kempe's religious pilgrimages—at once worldly and sacred—and the spiritual expansiveness of The Cloud of Unknowing, but also with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville—in the latter case, while the story is expansive, the author or compiler probably wasn't John Mandeville, and he probably didn't undertake any of the travels elaborated in the collection. John Mandeville, Englishman from St. Albans, was perhaps a Frenchman or a Fleming, deriving his sense of places and spaces from books rather than actual travels. The stories provide alternatives—pretty spectacular ones—to spiritual enclosure, choices for or descriptions of an active rather than enclosed life. Consideration of how medieval authors use spatiality requires yielding to allegorical as well as literal readings: broader application of narrative layering comprises an essential part of their narrative landscape and its expansiveness. Marie's spatial context entered the medieval world long before Dante's and Chaucer's. While all three at one time or another used courtly love, the Lais centralize it, turning secular or profane space toward spiritual space.3 The temporary ascending spiral of Dante's Purgatory with its periods of waiting modulates the permanent spirals of Inferno (descending) and Paradise (ascending), and movement through space brings attention to memorable—from terrifying to illuminating—individual places. Chaucer's social space contracts within the Tabard Inn, expands along the road to Canterbury, and contracts repeatedly around the individual pilgrims for their storytelling. The Old English "Wanderer" and "Seafarer" poems open up the world to the nearly endless space of loss and exile, while riddling poems such as "The Wife's Lament" and "Wulf and Eadwacer" seem to contract it around enclosures. Christine de Pizan metaphorizes her "City of Ladies" as the book in which the accounts of the ladies appear: the book encloses...

In Battle and in Bed: Wanton Women and Women Warriors in Muslim and Christian Crusade Narratives

AbstractThis article analyses the parallel representations of enemy warrior women as sexually profligate and inappropriately martial in selected Latin and Arabic texts from the period of the first three crusades (late eleventh to late twelfth centuries). Cross‐cultural comparison of depictions of fighting women demonstrates that both cultures portrayed the other side as dominated, and thus undermined, by women who were unnaturally assertive in both sexual and military affairs. Both Muslim and Christian authors sexualised and militarised the bodies of enemy women in order to define which men were the strongest, best and most deserving of battlefield victory in the holy wars of crusade and jihad.

Ancient Grains: New Evidence for Ancestral Puebloan Use of Domesticated Amaranth

We report here the first domesticated amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) seeds to be identified at a Chacoan great house, from the northern New Mexico site known as Aztec North, where they were found in a context that dates to the mid to late twelfth century AD. Amaranth has long been recognized as an important prehispanic resource in this region, evidenced by the archaeological record of both wild and domesticated forms and by the traditional knowledge and practices of Indigenous communities. Wild amaranth and similar-appearing chenopod/goosefoot (Chenopodium spp.) seeds are routinely found in Ancestral Puebloan contexts. Recent archaeological testing at the Aztec North great house, a Chaco Canyon outlier associated with a post-Chacoan political center, has revealed the presence of uncharred domesticated amaranth seeds in a thin layer of ashy trash in a room at the rear of the great house. These seeds expand our understanding of domesticated amaranth in the American Southwest and suggest centuries of continuity of traditional amaranth cultivation within Puebloan communities.

Cosmas Pragensis Chronica Bohemorum

<i>Cosmas Pragensis Chronica Bohemorum</i>

Von propositio bis consensus. Die Päpste, die ungarischen Könige und die kanonischen Wahlen in der ungarischen Kirche im 13. Jahrhundert

This paper discusses a special aspect of the Papal-Hungarian relations, the emergence of the canonical regulations in the archbishop and bishop elections in the Hungarian church from the late twelfth century. The study focuses on the actions of the popes regarding those elections. Furthermore, it examines how the regulations of the canon law influenced the situation in Hungary, and in which cases and under what circumstances the members of the cathedral-chapters, or the suffragan-bishops turned to the Apostolic See in cases of disputed elections. The paper also inquires into the role the Hungarian rulers played in the elections of the thirteenth century and looks at how they managed to help their candidates to receive the offices they sought. A further focus is on the question of whether there were significant clashes between ecclesiastical and lay power, sacerdotium and regnum in thir¬teenth century-Hungary and whether the elections really were a source of conflict between the popes and the Hungarian kings. Lastly, the paper identifies and analyzes which tenden¬cies existed until the outset of the fourteenth century regarding the above-mentioned ques¬tions, and, because a comparative approach is also necessary, evaluates these tendencies in light of the situation in other regions of Western Christendom.

Multiple lordship in twelfth-century England: a quantitative study

ABSTRACT Multiple lordship – holding land or owing allegiance to more than one lord simultaneously – has generally been regarded as a marginal practice in post-Conquest England, caused by the supposed breakdown of the seigneurial honour in the late twelfth century. This article overturns these assumptions with the results of a groundbreaking statistical study of 194 knightly families from Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, 1066–c.1216. The process of reconstruction and selection of these case studies is discussed. Even on a conservative analysis, 33 per cent of these knights had allegiances to multiple lords by c.1216. The proportion of multiple tenants, moreover, remains roughly stable over time, suggesting that this is a normal part of society and not the result of honorial erosion. These findings call for a revision of the way in which we conceptualise local political society, and the nature of the relationship between a lord and his tenants.

Emergence and Development of Pottery in the Andean Early Formative Period: New Insights from an Improved Wairajirca Pottery Chronology at the Jancao Site in the Huánuco Region, Peru

This article presents a high-resolution chronology of Wairajirca pottery in the Huánuco basin, which has been identified as a frontier region between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian rain forests: its pottery is known for having mixed features from both areas. However, the lack of fine-grained pottery and radiocarbon datasets has handicapped comparative studies’ attempts to track in detail its early development process. Our new high-resolution chronology of Wairajirca pottery is based on stratigraphic excavation data, a detailed ceramic typology, and a Bayesian analysis of the radiocarbon date from the Jancao site. The five-staged ceramic sequence from the late eighteenth to late twelfth century cal BC displays specific features of this development, including radical changes in vessel type over several centuries and connections with other pottery traditions. The earliest phase shows close relation with highlands traditions, whereas the influence of tropical rain forest patterns intensified in later phases alongside the continuation of local pottery traditions. This indicates that frontier dynamics based on fluid interactions across different ecological zones and regional sociopolitical movements played a crucial role in this long-term social process.

The philosophy of Constantine the Philosopher of Nicaea

Abstract The two extant works of Constantine the Philosopher of Nicaea reveal a late twelfth century thinker of the Neoplatonic sensibility typically seen only in those who reached the pinnacle of Byzantine literacy during this period. We argue that he is of particular interest because he coined two philosophical terms that, while mirroring controversial Neoplatonic concepts, better accommodate their Orthodox acceptance.We offer here some background on the author, a short discussion of the philosophical content of these works, and for the first time an English translation of both texts.

Anne Rochebouet, ed., Le Roman de Troie en prose, Prose 5. Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. 1038 pp.

Abstract: Anne Rochebouet offers here a valuable edition of an important medieval French work, a prose version of one of the foundational romans d’antiquité, the story of Troy as it was contained in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The narrative poem Le Roman de Troie, as recounted by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the late twelfth century, inspired the prose version edited here (along with 4 other versions) in the following two centuries. The base manuscript used for this edition is ms. London, BL, Royal 20 D.I., the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, copied in Naples at the Angevin court, sometime between 1335‐1340 with illustrations by Cristoforo Orimina. This version, known as Prose 5, forming one part of the Histoire ancienne, circulated at least until the sixteenth century. It exists in seventeen manuscripts described by Rochebouet in her most thorough introduction. Her linguistic analysis of ms. Royal 20 D.I. addresses the evolution of medieval French into Middle French as used in an Angevin Italian region during the reign of Robert I.