Latin Christendom Research Articles

The Medieval Cult of St Agatha of Catania and the Consolidation of Christian Sicily

In the twelfth century the cult of St Agatha of Catania was revived on the island of Sicily. This article explores the development of the cult within the wider process of the re-Christianisation of an island which had, in the previous century, been removed from Muslim control by Norman conquerors. It demonstrates that the revival of St Agatha's cult occurred through its connection to powerful political circles and to a range of emergent communication networks. The increasing renown of this shrine centre contributed to Sicily's integration into the Latin Christian world, and countered suspicious external perceptions of the island.

Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Poet-Patron Convention

RECENT studies of Old English verse have shown the benefits of considering an interplay of oral and literary poetic strategies, or hybrid poetics, when examining the conventions of vernacu lar poetry.1 It is at this nexus of literary and oral poetics that I would like to locate the following discussion of an Old English poet-patron convention. The approach of hybrid poetics explores extant verse from the supposition that Old English compositions were likely to have been influenced both by the values of Latin Christianity and by oral tradi tion. While the narratives and the rhetorical arts of the literature of

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages1

‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages’– a two-part article – questions the widely held belief in canonical race theory that ‘race’ is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries – chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features – the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion – so much in play again today – enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I –‘Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’– surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II –‘Locations of Medieval Race’– identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race1

‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages’– a two-part article – questions the widely held belief in canonical race theory that ‘race’ is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries – chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features – the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion – so much in play again today – enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I –‘Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’– surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II –‘Locations of Medieval Race’– identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

Mohamed Ajmal Abdul Razak (ed.), Islam Hadhari: Bridging Tradition and Modernity

As a manner of introduction, the editor of the book under review gives the background to Islam Hadhari or Civilisational Islam, essentially a comprehensive blueprint for progress postulated by the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dato’ Seri (now Tun) Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in the 2004 National Front Manifesto.
 In “Civilizational Dialogue and the Islamic World”, Seyyed Hossein Nasr traces the Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin Christian origins of the word ‘civilisation’. He speaks of the “Presiding Idea”, or “heavenly-given dispensation” that underlies all traditional civilisations, and attributes the decline of Islamic civilisation from the eighteenth century onward partly to colonisation and partly to the (erroneous) efforts of the Muslims themselves to uncritically emulate the West. Islamic civilisation, he concludes, is still best suited for inter-civilisational dialogue, occupying as it does the globe’s “middle belt”.

Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (eds), Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, Brill, Leiden, 2009.

Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (eds), <i>Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom</i>, Brill, Leiden, 2009.

Struggles for Individual Rights and the Expansion of the International System

AbstractWe live today in the world's first universal, multicultural, and multiregional system of sovereign states. Five centuries ago, emergent sovereign states were confined to Europe and contained within the bounds of Latin Christendom. Through five great waves of expansion this nascent European system globalized. The Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, the Versailles settlement, post-1945 decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet Union each brought a host of new states into the system. How can we explain these great waves of expansion, each of which saw imperial systems of rule displaced by the now universal form of the sovereign state? After detailing the limits of existing explanations, this article presents a new account of the principal waves of systemic expansion that stresses the importance of subject peoples' struggles for the recognition of individual rights. Empires are hierarchies, the legitimacy of which has been sustained historically by traditional regimes of unequal entitlements—institutional frameworks that allocate individuals of different social status different social powers and entitlements. In the Westphalian, Latin American, and post-1945 waves of expansion, which together produced most of today's sovereign states and gave the system its principal regions, subject peoples embraced local interpretations of new, distinctly modern ideas about individual rights and challenged the traditional distribution of entitlements that undergirded imperial hierarchy. Each wave differed, not the least because different rights were at work: liberty of religious conscience, the right to equal political representation, and after 1945, a compendium of civil and political rights. But in each case a “tipping point” was reached when the imperial system in question proved incapable of accommodating the new rights claims and subject peoples turned from “voice” to “exit,” and each time the sovereign state was seen as the institutional alternative to empire.

The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (review)

Reviewed by: The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe Anna Sapir Abulafia The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe, by Jonathan Boyarin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 208 pp. $32.50 In this study Jonathan Boyarin examines the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century encounter between the Catholic Spaniards and the inhabitants of the Caribbean and Latin America within the wider context of medieval Christian-Jewish (and to some extent Christian-Muslim) relations in Latin Christendom. For the year 1492 did not herald an unprecedented new beginning. Rather, the actions and ruminations of the Spanish explorers and mendicant missionaries echoed many centuries of Christian engagement with Jews (and Muslims) in different parts of Europe. Christian-Jewish relations were especially wrought because of the built-in ambiguities of that encounter. On the one hand, Christianity had emerged from a Jewish cradle to supersede its progenitor; on the other, Christians and Jews continued to vie with each other as rivaling siblings drawing their credentials from the same texts, which each read in opposing [End Page 164] ways. Judaism was theoretically tolerated by Christian teaching, but it was tolerated not for its own sake; Jews were preserved to serve Christians through witnessing to Christian truth by adhering to the Hebrew Bible in which Christians found the prophecies concerning Christ. The fact that they lacked dominion and lived under Christian rule served Christians by showing them how God punished those who rejected Christ. Yet in the end all Jews would recognize Christ as their God and savior. All of this meant that Christian-Jewish relations consisted of a volatile mix of toleration and deprecation. Jews were valued but at the same time feared as ever-present markers of possible opposition to Christian authority. Jews who did convert were often suspected of contaminating Christian purity; baptism was seen as only the beginning of a life-long journey to Christian perfection. (This was true for Christians and Jews alike.) Jews for their part had continually to negotiate their positions with the lords in whose lands they resided, taking advantage of the ever-present gulf between religious theory and pragmatic reality. Recent studies have examined the different trajectories of the medieval Jewries of England, Northern France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and regions of the Latin Mediterranean. Just as there was not one homogeneous medieval Christendom, there was not one medieval Jewry. This is, of course, equally true of the very disparate Muslim world which confronted medieval Christians in many different guises and arenas. As the Normans conquered Sicily and as the Christian kings of Iberia expanded their territories into Al-Andalus, more and more Muslims came under Christian sway. In North Africa and the Levant, however, Muslims were powerful antagonists both respected and feared by Christian knights for their military prowess. Along the frontiers of Eastern Europe Christians faced the military threat of the Mongols and Tartars from the thirteenth century. There were other others than Jews and Muslims! Boyarin's repeated insistence on the need to accept that Europe in 1492 was not a monolithic Christian entity lacking awareness of non-Christians within and without its borders does at times come across as a struggle to unlock an open door. True, there are still plenty of examples in the literature which betray what most scholars would now consider an outdated Christo-centric approach, but serious work in this area has been engaging with the medieval non-Christian other for some time. Indeed David Abulafia's The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus, which must have appeared while this book was in the press, examines the explorations of Columbus within the context of medieval forays into the Canary Islands, and European engagement between Christians and Jews is used as an interpretive tool in an attempt to understand how the Spanish tried to make sense of the large populations of non-Christian peoples they encountered. [End Page 165] Boyarin's emphasis on the paradox between Christian universalistic endeavors to include ever more peoples within the Christian fold and Christian attempts to work ever harder to achieve Christian purity within Christian society is undoubtedly important. As Christian doctrines were...

Liturgical Renewal in Two Eleventh-Century Royal Spanish Prayerbooks

In recent decades, transformations in medieval Christian liturgical practices have been explored for what they can tell scholars about cultural change. Shifts in ritual can indicate changing values and beliefs as well as mark the power of external influences. One relatively momentous shift in liturgical practice was the decision of Alfonso VI, king of Castilla-Leon at Burgos in 1076, after years of pressure from Pope Gregory VII, to begin the transition from the use of the Old Spanish liturgy (also called the Mozarabic, Visigothic, or Hispanic rite) within his domain in favor of the Roman liturgy used in the rest of Latin Christendom. This innovation is viewed as but one manifestation of a much broader “Europeanization” of medieval Spain that took place in the eleventh century, a movement that began in other Iberian Christian kingdoms, but reached its culmination in the reign of Alfonso VI, with his French brides, Cluniac monks, and receptivity to papal influence.

Liturgical Renewal in Two Eleventh-Century Royal Spanish Prayerbooks

In recent decades, transformations in medieval Christian liturgical practices have been explored for what they can tell scholars about cultural change. Shifts in ritual can indicate changing values and beliefs as well as mark the power of external influences. One relatively momentous shift in liturgical practice was the decision of Alfonso VI, king of Castilla-León at Burgos in 1076, after years of pressure from Pope Gregory VII, to begin the transition from the use of the Old Spanish liturgy (also called the Mozarabic, Visigothic, or Hispanic rite) within his domain in favor of the Roman liturgy used in the rest of Latin Christendom. This innovation is viewed as but one manifestation of a much broader “Europeanization” of medieval Spain that took place in the eleventh century, a movement that began in other Iberian Christian kingdoms, but reached its culmination in the reign of Alfonso VI, with his French brides, Cluniac monks, and receptivity to papal influence.

Les diocèses méridionaux d’après le Provinciale Romanum (XIIe-XVe siècle)

Southern Dioceses According to the Provinciale Romanum (12th-15th Centuries). The Roman Provinciale, an official catalogue of bishoprics of latin Christendom used by scribes of the central Church government, strongly reflects the papal claims to universalism. Dedicated to the dioceses of southern France, this paper stresses the great influence of the Notitia Galliarum (c. 400) on the Provinciale composed in the 12th century. Drawn up during the 1190’s, the new version of the text transmitted by the Liber Provincialis and the Liber censuum, and then copied in chronicles, established the division of the southern dioceses between France, Gascony and Burgundy, three territorial units to be joined, in the 14th century, by Provence, Aquitaine and Gothia. Under the reign of John XXII, the creation of the metropolis of Toulouse and of 16 episcopal sees in the provinces of Toulouse, Bourges, Bordeaux and Narbonne (1317-1318) gave rise to changes which concerned the chancery book, the Liber censuum and the Libri taxarum. Surviving evidence of the papal representation of the orbis christianus at odds with the tradition of late antiquity, the Provinciale of the Roman Church was exploited, since the 13th century, by the clerics of the french royal chancery who strove to define the realm as a space of sovereignty.

Ambrosiaster’s Interpretations of Romans 1:26-27

Abstract Scholarly discussions of patristic interpretations of Romans 1:26-27 have overlooked the fact that Ambrosiaster revised his reading of the passage. In the first version of his commentary on Romans, Ambrosiaster understands verse 26 to refer to “unnatural” sexual relations between women and men, whereas in the second and third versions he understands the verse to refer to “unnatural” sexual relations between women. The paper examines the differences between the three versions, explains Ambrosiaster’s remarks, and situates his interpretation within the moral outlook and exegetical tradition of Latin Christian writers.

Iconoclasmo e iconodulia entre oriente y occidente (siglo VIII-IX)

The following paper deals with the reception in the Carolingian west of the Byzantine Iconoclast Crisis. It considers the way both Christianities dealed with the problem that images presented to religious practices and the political consequences of iconic worship. The paper also states that during the VIII and IX centuries the iconoclast crisis allowed the emergence of a self conscious Latin Christian tradition. Consequentlyit was the moment that showed the beginning of two differing ways of Christian piety and the alienation of one towards the other. Western Christianity focused its religion practice in church building and the idea of Sacrality in the Eucharistic Rite. The oriental church, moreovers, centered its practices and theology on icon worship.

Prohibition-Era Aristotelianism: Parisian Theologians and the Four Causes

In this essay, I examine the reception and use of Aristotle’s four causes (efficient, formal, material and final) by twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin Christian theologians, primarily at Paris. I pay special attention to the early thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy (the libri naturales) were officially prohibited in the French capital. By looking at a wide range of texts from both prominent and obscure theologians, I hope to contribute to an expanded view of the ways in which intellectuals in the Latin west received and appropriated Aristotle’s ideas.

The union between Maronitae and Rome (1182) as the context of relationships between the Franks and the Oriental Churches in the Crusader states in the 12ᵗʰ century

The origin of the Crusader states in the territory of Asia caused an accumulation of new problems concerning co-existence among various groups of people. The groups included peoples from Europe and the Near East: the crusaders called Franks, Catholics and different groups of Oriental Christians, Muslims and Jews. This paper tries to explain how the crusaders and Maronitae could have adjusted to the agreement. The paper illustrates the situation of the Crusader states and gives some analysis of the relationships between the Franks and the Oriental Christians and, finally, it attempts to explain the problems of the union between Latin Christians and Maronitae.

The Friars Preachers: The First Hundred Years of the Dominican Order

AbstractThe first 100 years of the Dominican order witnessed the transition from a small group of men dedicated to preaching against the Albigensian heresy in southern France, to a transnational order with thousands of members affecting nearly every area of Latin Christendom. This essay is a short bibliographical overview of the state of Dominican studies for the first 100 years of their existence. It touches briefly upon the foundation, the idea of poverty, University study, preaching, inquisitions, female spirituality, and the Dominican relationship to the papacy. It offers a look both at the necessary sources for a study of the Dominicans, as well as a look at new directions in scholarship about the order.

An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500

This new survey of medieval European economic history is written in an easily approachable manner which will appeal to many readers, and avoids the sort of close numerical analysis that deters many students from economic history as a discipline. Each of the nine chapters has about thirty pages, divided into subsections, which allows for the comfortable reading of a topic at a time. Each deals with a separate theme and has a brief bibliography. The text is unreferenced. Though the first four chapters are concerned with distinctive features of the period before 1349, the author has concluded that a chronological approach to the central themes of economic and social development is possible only from the fourteenth century onwards (p. 159). He concentrates on developing an understanding of institutions such as towns, guilds, and governments, and of patterns of thought. His horizon usefully extends beyond Latin Christendom to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world, both of which are frequently referred to for social and economic parallels and contrasts. Generalisations are supported, and sometimes supplanted, by reciting particular instances; there are cameo accounts of a few cities (Bruges, Pisa and Milan), of guilds, wars and individual thinkers. Students will accordingly be able to acquire good information about particular topics even if their capacity to generalise needs developing later. Indeed, they will need to qualify some of the generalisations that the author proposes. Is it quite true, for example, that during the period 900–1349 Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and Africa increasingly ‘formed, to some extent, a common market’ (p. 70), or that ‘some regions of Europe, the Low Countries and northern Italy, were able to sustain a larger number of cities than others because of their good lands’ (p. 102)?

The Cult of St Nicholas in the Early Christian North (c. 1000–1150)

The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period, namely in the last decades of the 11th and the first decades of the 12th centuries. In spite of such a correspondence, the dissemination of the cult in the two adjacent regions has been treated as two separate phenomena. Consequently, the growing popularity of the cult in Scandinavia has traditionally been dealt with as an immanent part of the transmission of the Catholic tradition, and a similar phenomenon in northern Rus' has been discussed with reference to the establishment of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, the evidence analysed in this article shows that the establishment of the cult of St Nicholas in the two regions was an intertwined process, in which the difference between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy played a minor role. The early spread of this particular cult thus suggests that, as far as some aspects of the cult of saints are concerned, the division between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Northern Europe was less abrupt in the 11th and 12th centuries than has been traditionally assumed. This was due to the fact that the medieval cult of saints was not limited to the liturgy of saints, but was a wider social phenomenon in which political and dynastic links and cultural and trading contacts across Northern Europe often mattered more than confessional differences. When we leave the liturgy aside and turn to kings, princes, traders and other folk interacting across the early Christian North, then the confessional borders are less useful for our understanding of how some aspects of Christian culture were communicated across Northern Europe in the first two centuries after conversion.

Making Land and Water Meet: The Cycling of Nutrients between Fields and Ponds in Pre-Modern Europe

Abstract Medieval and early modern records show certain practices were common in traditional European aquaculture. These, combined with advice in coeval treatises on agricultural management, demonstrate how European agroecosystems linked terrestrial and aquatic operations to pursue a net energy gain in their outputs. Critical reading of three distinct bodies of sources: early modern European agricultural manuals, literature on fish culture compiled in western Latin Christendom, and managerial records of fourteenth-through seventeenth-century fish culture enterprises establishes two new understandings. First, land manages took self-conscious measures to integrate their arable and pond cultures with the aim of conserving and recycling essential nutrients. Second, agricultural handbooks from this period both reflected traditional practices of illiterate peasant farmers (and hence their "traditional ecological knowledge") and informed certain managerial decisions.

Horizontal and Vertical Theologies: “Sacraments” in the Works of Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie

In the middle decades of the ninth century, Charles the Bald, the West Frankish Carolingian ruler, received two treatises on the subject of the Eucharist. Paschasius Radbertus (ca. 790–ca. 865) and Ratramnus (d. after 868), both monks from the royal monastery at Corbie in Neustria, composed treatises entitled De corpore et sanguine domini.1 That these were the very first Latin Christian treatises devoted solely to the Eucharist and, further, that they came to different conclusions, has attracted well-earned scholarly scrutiny from almost immediately after their appearance. I would like to return to the question of the difference between their views. Specifically, I will show that the doctrinal differences between the two treatises have their roots in different approaches to, or—perhaps better—interests in, sacraments in general. The two authors do not take opposed positions on the topic of the sacraments, or even mutually contradicting positions on the Eucharist, rather they choose to emphasize different aspects of the sacrament, different guiding themes which suggest to each different lines of analysis. Paschasius sees sacraments primarily as instruments of unity, while Ratramnus views sacraments principally as salvific tools. This recognition yields two insights. It recalibrates analysis of the eucharistic tracts, foregrounding the contemporary concerns of the authors, while deliberately deemphasizing the subsequent theological controversies and scholarly debates into which the treatises were drawn. For both Paschasius and Ratramnus, distinctive approaches to sacraments color not only their analyses of the Eucharist, but also their approaches to larger political and social questions. This recognition also emphasizes the vibrance and creativity characteristic of the Carolingian theological milieu, too often dismissed as a supposedly derivative and unoriginal era in Christian theology. To these ends, the paper will proceed in four stages. First, I situate my question in the long historiography of the Corbie eucharistic treatises. Second, I briefly set the authors and their treatises in historical context. Third, I compare their ‘sacramental’ theologies of the Eucharist, underscoring both Paschasius's emphasis on its horizontal or communal significance and Ratramnus's stress on its vertical or salvific importance. Fourth, I trace how each author's particular sacramental interests remain consistent across their other projects with ramifications for their theological and social opinions.