Latin Passages Research Articles

Richard Stafford Poole (1930–2020)

Father Richard Stafford Poole, CM, passed away on November 1, 2020, in Perryville, Missouri, at the Apostle of Charity Residence. He was 90 years old. He was a Catholic priest, a gifted teacher, an accomplished historian, and a beloved friend.Father Poole was born on March 6, 1930, in Oxnard, California, to Joseph Poole and Beatrice (Smith) Poole, and he was raised in North Hollywood. After high school he joined the Congregation of the Mission of Saint Vincent de Paul and took his religious vows in 1949. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1952 at St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville, Missouri, and continued his theological studies there. He was ordained in 1956. Father Poole pursued his education, earning from Saint Louis University a master's degree in Spanish literature in 1958 and a doctorate in history in 1961.Father Poole taught at Cardinal Glennon College in Saint Louis, Missouri; St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville, Missouri; and St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California. He also served as dean of students at Cardinal Glennon College and as an academic dean and seminary rector at St. John's Seminary. He was a priest at Saint Jude the Apostle Church in Westlake Village, California, for nearly 20 years, where he regularly presided at Sunday masses.Father Poole was a prolific scholar who published more than a dozen books, 85 articles in anthologies, encyclopedias, and journals, and many book reviews on Spanish American history, the Catholic Church in the Americas, and Vincentian themes. His meticulously researched and clearly written books and articles made important contributions to the field of Latin American history. He wrote important biographies of colonial administrators, including Pedro Moya de Contreras and Juan de Ovando, based on extensive archival research. He also translated several important texts from Spanish and Latin, especially Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas's In Defense of the Indians as well as the Third Mexican Provincial Council's 1585 “Directory for Confessors” and Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci's Idea of a New General History of North America.Perhaps Father Poole is best known as the preeminent historian on the Guadalupan devotion in Mexico. In Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (1995), he painstakingly traced the history of the sources for the devotion, showing how evidence of the apparition story has evolved over time. He exposed the many silences in the record and the faulty genealogy of texts that proponents of the devotion have promoted. Based on his careful reading of the sources, he argued convincingly that the worship of Guadalupe emerged as a mid-seventeenth-century criollo devotion that was only later promoted among the Indigenous population of New Spain. Father Poole continued his research on the topic in The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico (2006), in which he examined challenges to the authenticity of the Guadalupe apparitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the more recent opposition to the canonization of Juan Diego. Father Poole examined both the apologists' and their critics' arguments and shows how changing political, religious, and cultural factors have shaped the controversies.Father Poole's deep interest in the sources on the cult of Guadalupe led him to undertake studying the Nahuatl language at the age of 60. He went on to publish translations of several important Nahuatl-language texts in the Guadalupan corpus, enriching the translations with his knowledge of the history of the devotion and of religious concepts, phrases, forms of address, and objects. First, he cotranslated Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649, the oldest Nahuatl-language account of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyacac and of the miracles attributed to her. He also cotranslated two Guadalupe plays for the second volume of Nahuatl Theater (2006). These important projects made available to an English-speaking audience texts that propagated the cult of Guadalupe among Nahuas from the mid-sixteenth century on. Father Poole was a generous colleague who enthusiastically shared his vast knowledge of Catholic doctrine, ritual, and history and translated Latin passages for other historians. He was a warm friend, an encouraging and collegial mentor of younger researchers, and an erudite scholar who participated actively in many annual professional meetings. In addition to his academic studies, he enjoyed traveling, listening to classical music, collecting clocks, and researching his family's genealogy.Father Poole was predeceased by his parents and his siblings, Dorothy and Joseph Jr. He is survived by his nieces Monica Smith of Gaborone, Botswana, and Michelle Emerle of Boston, Massachusetts, their husbands Mike and Gary, and his great-nieces and great-nephews: Stephen Smith, Emily Smith, Brent Emerle, and Taryn Emerle. Donations in his honor are gratefully accepted by St. Vincent Meals on Wheels, which may be made via either mail (St. Vincent Meals on Wheels, 2303 Miramar Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA) or their website (https://www.stvincentmow.org/).

Un milenio de textos grecolatinos relativos a las Islas Canarias

"Text, translation, and brief commentary of Greek and Latin passages, written throughout a millennium, regarding the Canary Islands, from the myth to the geographical reality, their several names and location in the map of the world known at that time."

L’ usage des fragments arabes (Le Caire, Taymūr Pāšā 290 aḫlāq) dans l’ édition arabo-latine de la Summa Alexandrinorum

Résumé Following the work of Dunlop (1974) and Badawī (1979), this study aims to prepare the way for a new edition of the Arabic fragments of the Iḫtiṣār al-Iskandarāniyyīn, which are preserved in Cairo manuscript Taymūr Pāšā 290 aḫlāq. This second phase of the project concerns a precise comparison between these Arabic fragments and the corresponding passages in the Arabo-Latin translation of the Summa Alexandrinorum, which was completed by Hermann the German in 1243 and will soon be published in a new edition. Comparing the Arabic fragments with the corresponding passages in Latin makes it possible: 1) to enhance earlier attempts to compile a glossary of Arabic and Latin terms as used by Hermann in his translations; 2) to evaluate how these Arabic fragments can properly be used for the new edition of the Arabo-Latin version of the Summa Alexandrinorum; 3) to draw some conclusions about the status of these Arabic fragments and Hermann’s methods, as well as Hermann’s underlying aims. The paper concludes by offering a methodological perspective on the forthcoming edition of the Summa Alexandrinorum in its Arabo-Latin version.

Compositio y argumentación en la poesía de Rui Moniz

Como sus contemporáneos, Rui Moniz, poeta cortesano cuya actividad poética se sitúa en los años ʼ60 o ‘70 del siglo xv, cultivó en su poesía el recurso a textos ajenos. El presente artículo, atento a las distintas modalidades de inserción de éstos y a su funcionalidad en el corpus poético del autor, se articulará en dos partes: la primera incidirá sobre la práctica de la cita, que revela intentos de creatividad y de renovación en el ámbito de los géneros dialógicos, del bilingüismo y de la intertextualidad; la segunda, sobre las relaciones entre compositio y argumentación. La integración de la cabeza de una canción de autoría anónima en el final de las coplas que constituyen un celebrado decir con citas configura una caso paradigmático de este género, que, por insertar siempre el mismo fragmento y en posición idéntica, se aproxima de la glosa, subrayando el carácter híbrido de esta composición en particular. Si la acomodación de pasajes de los textos evangélicos de san Juan y de san Mateo representa una forma de cita particular, pues los fragmentos son sometidos a un ejercicio de adaptación al contexto en el cual están integrados, la inserción de pasajes en latín en un texto acogedor elaborado en portugués configura también una relación con el bilingüismo cuya funcionalidad es diferente de la que podemos observar en otras composiciones del cancionero de Resende en las que la dos lenguas coexisten. El trabajo en torno a la compositio, con recurso a las figuras per ordinem de la anástrofe, del hipérbaton y del isocolon, así como a la estructura sintáctica de los versos según los varios grados de elaboración del discurso, refuerza el proyecto argumentativo del poeta, subrayando su agudeza retórica y relegando a un segundo plano el color libertino de algunas composiciones.

L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menester: Fonts clàssiques d’un refrany català inclòs en la Paremiologia catalana comparada de Sebastià Farnés

This paper aims to investigate the Classical proverbs listed as equivalents to the Catalan proverb L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menester by Sebastia Farnes in his volume entitled Paremiologia catalana comparada. In this paper, I will establish these Classical proverbs’ sources, consider their authenticity and correspondence with this Catalan proverb, and increase the number of Classical sources, since this Catalan proverb bears witness to its Classical tradition and is related to philosophical and literary passages that can be considered as previous manifestations of this tradition. These Greek and Latin passages are compiled and compared so as to determine the different ways in which the idea included in this Catalan proverb was expressed over time. The conclusion is that the consideration about friendship presented by this proverb is embedded into a long textual/ideological tradition which ultimately refers to the sage Solon, the poet Theognis and the philosopher Theofrast, although there may be connections with the Judeo-Christian tradition as well.

Traduzindo os recursos sonoros do livro I da Utopia para o português do Brasil

Utopia’s Latin text is full of sound and meaning resources, few of them really taken into account in translations of this work to other languages. These resources are important – even if scarcely noted by translators – because, as pointed out by Edward Surtz (1967), if the manner in wich a writer expresses himself is moulded by ideas, the ideas are also moulded by tools of expression. Their being indissociable was already perceived by Juan Vives in the Sixteenth century, when he gave his reasons for reading Utopia: because of both the language and the subject. Nevertheless, one of the least studied aspects of the libellus aureus is precisely the specificity of the language in which it was written, its style, and its particularities. Among them there is the musicality, or rather the “physical aspects” of Morean language, its “rhymes and rhythms”, on the words of Andre Prevost (1978). This paper aims at appreciating some “figures of sound” (as said by Surtz) of Utopia’s book I. For that purpose, we will compare the Latin passages with two Brazilian translations, the most recent Portuguese version as well as my own.

In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing by Jeanette Beer (review)

Reviewed by: In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing by Jeanette Beer Glynnis M. Cropp Beer, Jeanette, In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014; cloth; pp. 176; R.R.P. US$50.00; ISBN 9781442647541. Given current interest in the crusades and chronicles, this book will have a wide readership. Jeanette Beer has here pursued her scholarly work in the field of medieval history-writing through the formative period between [End Page 219] the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, from the Strasbourg oaths to the compilation/translation of Li Fet des Romains. She sets out from Isidore of Seville’s definition of history as the narration of events that deserve to be remembered and which constitute the truth. Hence the importance of eyewitness accounts, ipsissima verba (‘words actually spoken’) and the use of direct and indirect speech in this examination of five landmark texts, three of which are chronicles by Crusade participants. The Strasbourg oaths in Nithard’s Historiae contain the earliest words of French recorded. Building on her analysis in an earlier essay, Beer explains the chancery process and the function of the oaths in the Historiae, where they are preceded by a speech in Latin. She speculates on the understanding of the vernacular by the respective French- and German-speaking armies and on what they reflect of Nithard’s anxiety for the empire. The anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, a straightforward narrative in Latin, is an eyewitness account of the First Crusade from a soldier’s viewpoint. It has been recognised as the expedition’s unofficial history. The author believed that events in which he participated were of epic importance and frequently used direct speech to endorse the veracity and immediacy of his story. He presented, for example, the pope’s call to the Crusade as though he had been present and heard the very words. Villehardouin, a leader and negotiator in the Fourth Crusade, presented in La Conquête de Constantinople a different viewpoint and experience for an audience interested in diplomacy as well as military activity. He referred to himself and his participation in the third person, speaking also as author and eyewitness in the first person, and sometimes shifting responsibility somewhat ambiguously to li livres, ‘the book’. His use of direct speech is concentrated in the first half of the chronicle, for example, in the account of negotiations with the doge of Venice and the pope. In contrast, Robert de Clari’s account of the Fourth Crusade is that of a poor knight following his overlord and returning home before the eventual débâcle. His lively narrative of ‘le dreite verité’ (p. 58), everything he could remember, as he likes to repeat, using the first person as self-referencing and direct speech, sometimes for dramatic effect, verges on the fabliau style, it is suggested, for he is pre-eminently a storyteller. Two chapters are devoted to Li Fet des Romains, which Beer studied in A Medieval Caesar (Droz, 1976). It is an anonymous compilation translated into the French vernacular from all the known works concerning Julius Caesar, first and foremost from his Commentaries on the Gallic wars and Lucan’s Bellum Civile, with debts and attributions to other classical historians. Interesting points discussed include: Caesar’s dictum, the compiler’s tactical shifting of responsibility when he disagreed with his source material, adaptation of Lucan’s verse epic and its pagan mythology, supplementation, [End Page 220] and interpolation. The compiler/translator astutely employed quotation, sometimes appropriating it, at other times distancing himself from ancient historians and speaking in his own voice to complete the truth. Analysis of the stylistic practice of quotation and self-referencing shows how the five specimen texts significantly contributed to the evolution of medieval history-writing. An Afterword sketches their diffusion and later role as sources, in turn, for quotation. Notes, Works Cited, a Name Index, and a Subject Index complete the work. All French and Latin passages cited are carefully translated into English. Oversights are rare, but in two instances a word was inadvertently repeated: ‘are’ (p. 33, translation l.1), ‘abundantly’ (p...

Varia I.

VARIA I 1. DE DUODECIM ABUSIVIS SAECULI IN MEDIAEVAL IRELAND De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi ‘On the twelve afflictions of the world’, is a well-known seventh-century Hiberno-Latin treatise on moral and political matters.1 As is the case with most Latin texts produced in Ireland in the pre-Norman period, all surviving MS copies of De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi are found outside Ireland.2 There is, however, evidence that the text was still available in Ireland in the Middle Irish period, the most substantial being the text Sermo ad Reges ‘A sermon to kings’, a bilingual Latin and MidIr text preserved in the Leabhar Breac.3 As has been shown by Miles (2014), one of the main sources drawn on in this text is the section of De Duodecim on the rex iniquus ‘the wicked king’. The short poem printed below for the first time is evidence at least for knowledge of the preface to De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi in mediaeval Ireland.4 The only copy known to me is in the composite MS, TCD H 2. 16 (1318), known as the Yellow Book of Lecan.5 It is found on column 248.208 (facsimile p. 420), which belongs to section 5 of the MS; this is dated by a scribal note at the bottom of the same column to 1465.6 The whole column is badly worn, and many words are difficult to read. In 4b the reading nocthigernn, apart from the final ernn, is doubtful, and in 4c ac cosnum can just barely be made out. I give the text as in the MS, but with the addition of punctuation, capitalisation and macrons over long vowels. Unambiguous abbreviations (spiritus asper for h, etc.) are not indicated. As the ascription Mughrōn cecinit provides no details other than the first name, it is impossible to determine who this Mugrón might be. In the notes to his edition of the poem Cros Chrı́st tarsin ngnúis-se, Murphy (1956, 186 7) comments that the ascription in one of the MSS, Mugron comharba Choluim Cille cecinit, that is, to the successor of Colum Cille who died in AD 980, ‘is linguistically probable, and as Mugrón is not a person to whom Irish scribes frequently attribute poems it may be taken to be based on genuine tradition’. He refers to Kenney (1929, 7267) where three other ascriptions to Mugrón are noticed; in two of these cases the author is DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2014.64.205 Ériu LXIV (2014) 205211 # Royal Irish Academy 1 Edited by Hellmann (1909); see Lapidge and Sharpe (1985, 967), and Breen (2002). 2 See Sharpe (2010) and Ó Corráin (201112). 3 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 16 (1230) pp 35b2640a25. The edition in Atkinson (1887), where the MidIr passages are printed on pp 15162 and the Latin passages are extracted and a version of them is printed separately on pp 41418, is a travesty of the MS original; cf. the comments in Miles (2014, 1412, 157). 4 As Flower (1926, 489) notes, the Latin preface also circulated independently of the rest of the text. 5 The title, of course, properly applies only to part of the MS; see, for example, Best (1950) and Ó Concheanainn (1987). 6 See Abbott and Gwynn (1921, 344). specified as comarba Coluim Chille,7 whereas the third ascription, the heading to a poem of three verses on Colum Cille (Meyer, 1915, 340), has simply Mughrón cecinit. To these can be added the ascription of a poem of five verses on the death in AD 956 of Congalach mac Maı́l Mithig, in British Library MS Additional 30512 f. 40Vb4, to Mugron comarba Coluim Chille, for which see Flower (1926, 492). Mugrón Tuama dá Gualann8 is doubtless a different person to the successor of ColumCille. Henameshimselfastheauthorinthelastverseofapoemofsix verses on the sons of Adam beginning Dā mac ar chāecait co mbroit in the Book of Lecan version of Sex Aetates Mundi. The verse is cited in Ó Cróinı́n (1983, 19 n16), who also notes a verse in...

Republican empire: colonialism, commerce and corruption in the Dutch Golden Age

Renaissance StudiesVolume 26, Issue 4 p. 491-509 Republican empire: colonialism, commerce and corruption in the Dutch Golden Age ARTHUR WESTSTEIJN, ARTHUR WESTSTEIJN Royal Netherlands Institute, RomeSearch for more papers by this author ARTHUR WESTSTEIJN, ARTHUR WESTSTEIJN Royal Netherlands Institute, RomeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 August 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2012.00824.xCitations: 5 This article is the first spin-off of a larger project on the ideological origins of the Dutch colonial empire in the seventeenth century. I would like to thank Lodi Nauta and Michiel van Groesen for their comments on an earlier version, and Andrea Robiglio for helping me out with some obscure Latin passages. Read 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 Citing Literature Volume26, Issue4Special Issue: The intellectual history of early modern empire, guest edited by Andrew FitzmauriceSeptember 2012Pages 491-509 RelatedInformation

Early Christianity in North Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Early Christianity in North Africa J. Patout Burns François Decret Early Christianity in North Africa Translated by Edward L. Smither Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009. Edward L. Smither has done a great service in translating François Decret's 1996 Le christianisme en Afrique du Nord ancienne, which provides a brief but reasonably comprehensive survey of the development of Christianity in Roman Africa from its beginnings through its unrecorded death by suffocation under the weight of Islamic civilization, perhaps as late as the eleventh century. After an introductory study of the Phoenician and Roman contributions to the organization and urbanization of the area, the narrative devotes a chapter to the origins of Christianity in the second and first part of the third century, relying on martyrdom narratives, archeological evidence of Christian burials, and the writings of Tertullian. Three chapters are then dedicated to the third century, detailing the conflicts with the Roman state in the mid-century persecutions, the development of church organization, and the elaboration of Cyprian's ecclesiology. The seventh chapter, the longest and perhaps most useful contribution of the book, provides a detailed account of the division of the Donatists from the Catholics and the schisms within the Donatist movement in the late fourth century. A survey of the other religious traditions—traditional Roman practice, Judaism and Manichaeism—at the end of the fourth century prepares for the study of Augustine, which is focused on the Pelagian controversy, the reformation of the African church under Aurelius, and the complex dealings of the African bishops with the Roman church and the imperial government. The final chapter sketches the Vandal and Byzantine occupations and the Arab conquest, using archeological evidence to date the end of African Christianity. The text is supplemented by two maps, a chronological table, an index, and the bibliography of the original French edition, which is largely in that language. [End Page 145] A reader familiar with the primary sources will recognize that Decret is pushing the available evidence to its limit, and occasionally beyond. Some of the reconstructions—the organization of local churches as burial societies (17f.)—are compatible with, but not established by, the evidence. Others have been disputed as misinterpretations of the meager indicators on which they are built—the origins of the persecution around 202 in Severus's trip to Palestine (23) and the sequence of Tertullian's ecclesial affiliations (40f.). A few, such as the estimating of the general and Christian populations of Africa in the first part of the fifth century at six and two million respectively (144) can only be based on speculation. The assertion that Carthage was glutted with five hundred clergy in 430 (183) is misleading at best. The primary limitation of this study, however, is the sparse referencing of the evidence for these assertions. The judgments offered in the chapter on Donatism, in particular, makes this reader suspect that it was written on the basis of secondary literature rather than primary sources, even as J. L. Maier has made these so easily accessible in Le dossier du Donatisme. The general reader is induced to believe that a great deal is known with certainty; more suspicious academic users cannot identify and evaluate sources of Decret's information that they may have overlooked. With the proper caution, however, this volume can be quite useful. Decret attends to the interaction of Christian and imperial culture throughout the narrative. The complexity of Tertullian and Augustine's appreciation of the Roman Empire is well developed. That Tertullian and Cyprian, as well as some bishops in the early fourth century, continued to enjoy the assistance and even protection of influential non-Christians shows that even in time of persecution, the bonds of family and friendship held firm. Cyprian's understanding of the episcopate and the independence of the local bishop and Augustine's quarrel with the Pelagians are both well explained. Smither's translation of the French is readable and accurate. He uses existing English translations of the extended Latin passages cited by Decret. The few errors and infelicities occur in short Latin phrases which Smither has translated himself. The French version is listed by Worldcat in...

Robert Henryson and the Matter of Multilingualism

Medieval multilingualism can be a gaudy affair. It can feature so promi- nently in the design and rhetoric of a work that it does not simply cap- ture a reader's attention but instead serves, as much as love or virtue or political order, as one of that work's central thematic and organizing principles. Without multilingualism, Piers Plowman would certainly be difficult to imagine. Latin supplies quotations, technical words, and a critical subtext that advance the poem's plot, meditation on concepts like salvation, and even the depiction of characters like Anima, who move into and out of Latin in conversationally strategic ways. This movement itself advances one of the poem's most prominent topics: the dynamics between an authoritative culture (social as well as religious) that is medi- ated by Latin and a popular culture mediated by English and focused on challenging inherited notions of piety, language, and politics. In many ways, through its use of multilingualism Piers Plowman precociously depicts a world in which English has come to displace Latin's status as a High Language in medieval England's diglossia, a world that would not in fact come into sociolinguistic existence for another 300 years or so. And the importance of multilingualism to Piers Plowman was not lost on the scribes who transmitted the text. They gave particular attention to maintaining a consistent, restrained format throughout the tradition, and among the features they maintained was the highlighting of Latin passages, whether through rubrication or underscoring in red. John Gower's works offer similarly gaudy examples of multilingualism. Gower's entire career is of course multilingual, since he wrote successively in Latin and French as well as English, but, more narrowly, the Confessio Amantis offers a widely known and discussed interplay of Latin and English at several compositional levels. The individual English tales are framed by Latin verses, while a Latin commentary develops more fully the poem's allusions, rhetorical devices, and ethics. As with the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those of the Confessio foreground the work's multilingual na- ture by setting off and rubricating much of the Latin text, rendering the interplay of Latin and English a particularly prominent feature of one of the most deluxe manuscript traditions of late-medieval England. Gower

A Note on the Status of Origen's De Principiis in English

AbstractThe standard English translation of Origen's De principiis, translated by G.W. Butterworth and published in 1936, is based upon the earlier critical edition of Paul Koetschau. Origen's text survives through the Latin translation of Rufinus, a version that Koetschau fundamentally distrusted: Rufinus had admittedly expurgated Origen's text and could not, accordingly, be trusted. Hence the job of the editor and translator was judged to be the reestablishment—as far as was possible—of Origen's original text. Such suspicion of the text led to, among other problems, the awkward printing of parallel Greek and Latin passages in columns in Butterworth's English edition. Greek fragments and Origenistic material—that is to say, passages that were not direct quotations of De principiis, nor even directly Origen's—were inserted into Koetschau's text based upon presumed doctrinal parallels between those fragments and Origen's 'authentic' thought.We cannot reconstruct the Greek text; what we have inherited for better or worse is Rufinus's Latin translation of Peri archôn, a text that the more recent scholarship of G. Bardy and others have significantly rehabilitated confidence in. With the notable exception of English, translations of De principiis have been made in French, Italian and German, based upon more recent and more balanced critical editions. The author proposes a new English translation of Rufinus's Latin text based upon the critical edition of Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, published in the Sources Chrétiennes series.

The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century (review)

The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century. By M.A. Claussen. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought-Fourth Series, Vol. 61.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 342. $80.00.) This is an extremely welcome book. It fills what has been a significant gap in our knowledge of the eighth-century Church, and it puts Chrodegang firmly on the map as bishop, reformer, founder of Gorze, and patron of Lorsch. It draws attention to the importance of the councils of Ver, Verberie, and Attigny dominated by Chrodegang, and it analyzes the Rule for canons in scrupulous detail. The analysis of the Rule takes up a good third of the book. Claussen examines the relationship between Chrodegang's instructions for canons and Benedict's for monks, showing exactly how they differ-though here (and indeed elsewhere) it is perhaps a pity that no translation is provided for lengthy passages in Latin: the effect will be to put off students, who could learn a great deal from the discussion. Claussen goes on to look at Chrodegang's dependence on Gregory the Great, Caesarius of Aries, and also Pomerius, author of De vita contemplativa. The discussion of Pomerius is particularly useful; it provides a full description and evaluation of an important but understudied work. All this analysis Claussen achieves with a keen sense of the value of intertextuality which allows him not only to note where Chrodegang departs from or disagrees with his sources, but also where he appears to be pushing his own clergy further than the basic text of his Rule implies. In the final third of the book Claussen opens up his discussion to look at Chrodegang's ideas for the community of Metz as a whole-to be thought of as a new hagiopolis, comparable in certain respects with Rome. For this he draws attention to the evidence for the bishop's involvement in liturgical reform in his own city, which involves both archaeological and art-historical material (notably the chancel of St. Pierre-aux-Nonnains) and also those liturgical manuscripts which have been associated in one way or another with Chrodegang or Metz. Claussen's reading of the Rule and of Chrodegang more generally is totally convincing, and provides us with a fixed point, to put alongside Boniface, for understanding the Frankish Church in the generation before Charlemagne. Perhaps inevitably, in doing so Claussen leaves us with questions which need more consideration-though some may well prove to be insoluble. …

The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents Agnes Juhasz-Ormsby (bio) Germaine Warkentin , editor. The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents. Assisted by John Carmi Parsons Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 158. $15.00 Germaine Warkentin's edition of the primary source text of Elizabeth I's royal entry to the City of London on 14 January 1559 is a particularly welcome contribution to the growing number of studies on early modern continental and English ceremonies and spectacles. This concise edition fills a gap in the extensive literature on Elizabeth I and provides an excellent supplement to the forthcoming volumes of John Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. In accordance with the format and goals of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies' Tudor and Stuart Texts series, Warkentin presents a modernized text of the official pamphlet of the entry, hitherto accessible only in facsimile, in a critical edition aimed both at a scholarly audience engaged with Tudor history and European festivals, and students of Elizabethan literature and theatre. The annotated bilingual (English and Latin) text of The Queen's Majesty's Passage, attributed to the humanist scholar Richard Mulcaster, is accompanied by informative secondary material including translations of Latin passages (prepared with the assistance of John Carmi Parsons), a series of illustrations, a glossary and gazetteer, and a comprehensive bibliography. In addition, a group of related documents locates the narrative account within the context of civic pageantry staged specifically for a monarch's coronation. Directed with a strong propagandistic overtone both to a popular and a learned audience, The Queen's Majesty's Passage was the first English news pamphlet ever to publish a description and interpretation of the entry alongside the English and Latin verses recited or displayed at the pageants. Warkentin's thoroughly researched and insightful introduction offers a lively reading of Elizabeth I's rather precarious debut on the politically and religiously charged public stage of sixteenth-century England, following her brother Edward VI's devoutly Protestant then her sister Mary I's turbulent Catholic rule. She sensitively delineates how the uncertainty posed by the ascension of the young unmarried Queen regnant influenced the overall design of the entry and the carefully orchestrated encounter of Queen and her people within the ritual space of London. Apart from the conventional themes of royal entries, Warkentin draws special attention to the political imagery specific to Elizabeth I's entry: the receiving of the English Bible by the Queen, the pageant of Truth as the daughter of Time, and the aptly biblical antecedent of Deborah and her counsel (with its veiled advice about collaborative rule) that signalled the firmly Protestant agenda promoted by the municipal authorities and the evangelical circles around the Queen. Furthermore, Warkentin underscores the ironies of the continuity of Tudor power manifested not only in the reappropriation of [End Page 252] the Marian image of the decayed and flourishing commonwealth in the pageant at the Little Conduit and the alteration of Mary I's robe for Elizabeth's entry (the record of which is included in the appendix and famously preserved on Elizabeth's 'Coronation Portrait'), but also in the symbolic rehabilitation of Anne Boleyn at the Gracious Street pageant. In the appendix, the edition usefully prints the Italian Aloisio Schivenoglia's court-centred report to the Catholic Castellan of Mantua, which is interestingly juxtaposed with the pronounced civic interest and evangelical views of Mulcaster's pamphlet. Moreover, the accounts of contemporary English chronicles and the miscellaneous records, ranging from the documents of the City's governing bodies to those of court officials, provide illuminating details of the complex organizational process and well illustrate the broad variety of available sources. Apart from offering inspiration for further research, the edition, which my upper-level undergraduate students found extremely helpful in a course on Renaissance festivals, pointedly calls attention to the marginalized texts of royal entries and lord mayor's shows written by such prominent playwrights as Nicholas Udall, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Anthony Munday. More importantly, it highlights the need to integrate such source texts not only in university courses on...

The Homiliary of the Taunton Fragments

THREE years ago, Professor Simon Keynes made a remarkable discovery at the Somerset County Record Office at Taunton, where he found four leaves of what must have been a bilingual, Latin and Old English, collection of expositions of gospel pericopes. The leaves, now with the shelfmark DD/SAS C/1193/77, which were presumably acquired by the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society at some time in the second half of the nineteenth century, had remained unknown to Anglo-Saxonists throughout the twentieth century. They were written about the middle or, more probably, in the second half of the eleventh century and contain parts of the expositions of the gospel pericopes for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth Sunday after Pentecost. Each exposition begins with the incipit of the gospel pericope (lost in the case of the fifth Sunday); the following exposition, or homily, is divided into brief passages in Latin, alternating with their Old English translations.

The Taunton Fragment: a new text from Anglo-Saxon England

The Taunton Fragment (now Taunton, Somerset, Somerset County Record Office, DD/SAS C/1193/77) consists of four leaves containing portions of brief expositions or homilies on the pericopes for four successive Sundays after Pentecost. In the Fragment, brief passages in Latin regularly alternate with the Old English translations of these passages. The manuscript to which the four leaves once belonged was written probably at some point around or after the middle of the eleventh century in an unknown (presumably minor) centre in Anglo-Saxon England. Until recently, the existence of the Taunton leaves had escaped the notice of Anglo-Saxonists; the texts which they contain are printed here for the first time. It will be obvious that eight pages, half of which are in Old English prose, add in no negligible way to the corpus of Old English. Through analysis of the texts in the second part of this article, I hope to show that their contribution to our knowledge of various kinds of literary activity in Anglo-Saxon England is significant indeed, and that the linguistic evidence they present has no parallel elsewhere in the corpus of Old English.

Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (review)

Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. By Ruth B. Bottigheimer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. viii + 156 pp. Fairy Godfather is a monographic essay on Giovanni Francesco da Caravaggio's Pleasant Nights, a two-volume collection of stories published in Venice between 1550 (1551) and 1553, and reprinted more than twenty times in the following fifty years. The study consists of five chapters, two of which, about the two-thirds of the book, concern the author's biography and sociocultural context. I'll start this review by focusing on those chapters. Chapter 3, A Possible Biography for Zoan Francesco da tries to reconstruct imaginatively the biography of an author about whom very little is known. The facts we can be certain of are very few: the birth in Caravaggio, a rural village in the vicinity of Bergamo; a book of poetry published in 1508 (Opera nova [Venice, new expanded edition in 1515]); the move from Caravaggio to Venice; the publication of the two volumes of Pleasant Nights in 1550 (1551: the dedication is dated more veneto on 2 January 1550) and, in 1553, ad instanza dell'autore (i.e., at Straparola's own expense); no further participation of the author in the 1558 edition, allowing one to infer that his death occurred between 1555 and 1558. On this meager framework Bottigheimer builds a completely fictitious biography, supported by no philological or documentary verification. She imagines that lived as subaltern intellectual, assistant, or teacher at a noble house in Venice or nearby (Padova or Treviso), writing for others more than for himself; before that, she invents his humble childhood in Caravaggio by getting clues of Straparola's life and psychology from two tales: that of Fortunio (III, 4), where we read an account of the painful discovery of being an adopted child; and that of Zambo (V, 3), where we read about the long and uneven trip from Valsabbia (near Brescia) to Venice. Along the same lines is chapter 4, Straparola at His Desk, in which Bottigheimer reconstructs the publishing iter and the structure of Pleasant Nights. One can overlook the startling invention of two dialogues between and the Venetian publisher Comin da Trino. But I would question the author's conclusion that volume two betrays the presence of a second author. This conclusion is based on the asymmetry of book II in comparison with book I and with the initial project (thirteen instead of ten nights, thirteen tales in the last night against five tales in all others), on some glaring errors that affect the frametale and individual tales, and on the weighty reuse, in the last two nights, of Morlini's Novellae translated from Latin. These imperfections in the collection have been noticed by other scholars and ascribed to a certain haste created by the success of book I and the desire to publish a second book; regarding the use of Morlini, previous scholars have seen a specific literary interest in bringing a little-known and semiclandestine text to life again. Even if we may not agree with this (Bottigheimer assumes that did not know Latin well and that he drew from well-known florilegia the few Latin passages in his collection), there is no compelling reason to believe that another author collaborated on book II; in any case, such hypothetical collaboration would exist only for nights 11 and 12, since Bottigheimer acknowledges that night 13 is by himself, as is the dedication, commonly written after completion of the book. Pages of this kind may provide a fictional vision of the good old days (and the good old Venice), but they don't fit well into a scholarly monograph on an author of the Italian Renaissance. Moreover, these hypotheses underestimate the solid literary learning that underlies Straparola's oeuvre, as shown in the commentaries of Giuseppe Rua (Bari: Laterza, 1927) and Donato Pirovano (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2000). …

Medieval Exegesis . Vol. I The Four Senses of Scripture by Henri De Lubac (review)

running head henri de lubac, MedievalExegesis. Vol. I The Four Senses ofScripture, translated by Mark Sebanc. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. Pp. xxiii, 466. isbn: 0-8028-4145-7. $45. Henri de Lubac's study of the four senses ofscripture (published in 1959 as the first part oíExégèse médiévale) is probably more often referred to than actually read as a classic in its own right. It is not often realized that de Lubac (1896-1991) played a major role in the revitalization ofcatholic thought in the decades prior to the Second Vatican Council, through both his students and a great range ofwritings, whether about Buddhism (1951-55), Origen and medieval exegesis (1959—64), atheism (1968), Teilhard de Chardin (1962-68), Pico della Mirandola (1974), or Joachim of Fiore (1979-81). In all these works, de Lubac was fascinated by possibilities offered by any hermeneutic that emphasized spiritual dimensions of meaning. As de Lubac explains, there were many variant forms of the theory of multiple meaning. According to one popular saying, 'the letter teaches events, allegory what you believe, morality what you do, anagogy what you aim for.' There were many versions, however, ofthe theory. Origen espoused a three-fold system, that ascended from the historical to the mystical and then to the moral sense. De Lubac tells the fascinating story of Origen's influence in the Latin West. Although officially condemned for heresy, Origen's writings were still copied through translations made by Rufinus and Jerome, despite the dangers they recognized in his work. De Lubac's concerns in MedievalExegesis can be read as a coded critique ofthe narrowness ofthe neo-scholastic orthodoxy then prevailing in catholic circles in the 1950s, along the same lines as Jean Lcclercq in The Love ofLearning and the Desirefor God (1957). MedievalExegesis is the more nuanced and richly documented work. Lcclercq's vision ofmonastic culture as a whole was perhaps too much shaped by his fascination for St. Bernard, and a tendency to classify medieval thought as either monastic and meditative or scholastic and unspiritual. De Lubac's analysis is more aware of its diversity. De Lubac's discussion of medieval interpretations about the injunction (Deut. 21:10-14) t0 capture a beautiful woman from the enemy, shave her and then marry her as about the appropriation ofpagan wisdom, touchingly unaware oftheir sexist brutality, unconsciously sheds much light on the gendered assumptions ofmedieval exegesis as a whole. The theory that there were multiple senses to scripture was itself based on analogy with the presence of different dimensions (body, soul, and spirit) in the human person. While not commenting explicitly on Origen's act of selfmutilation , he indirectly helps show how medieval exegesis was itself shaped by ambiguous attitudes towards the body. Origen acted out a process ofself-castration that monks and clerics (as well as their academic heirs) have long engaged in through the mind. De Lubac's rich documentation enables us to become aware ofthe way in which so much medieval exegesis is about a struggle with the meaning ofthe body. Nowhere is this more vivid than in the tradition of ascetics commenting on the 'Song ofSongs.' Although Origen was always hostile to gnostic exegesis, and insisted on the fundamental continuity of the Old Testament and the New, he was himself arthuriana accused ofgnostic extravagance. By releasing exegesis from the constraints ofa purely literal interpretation (favored by the Antiochian school), Origen encouraged William ofSt. Thierry and St. Bernard to explore the richness oferotic desirewhile suppressing awareness of the physical. Not all medieval writers agreed with their exegesis. De Lubac is certainly too dismissive ofthe creativity ofliteral exegesis between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, practiced alongside moralizing and allegorical interpretations. Like Leclercq, de Lubac was writing within the context ofa debate among catholic scholars within religious orders, important in the 1950s but now rather dated, that pitted admirers of patristic asceticism against enthusiasts for scholastic culture. Mark Sebanc's fluent translation of both de Lubac's text and of numerous Latin passages itselftestifies to the fact that we can no longer take for granted the capacity of students interested in medieval literature to...

A Liturgical Miscellany in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190

The composite volume now known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College [CCCC] 190, contains on pages 143 to 151 a mixture of liturgical exposition and prescription. The Latin passages constitute neither a polished work nor, like much else in the manuscript, an obvious antecedent to Old English texts, and so the group has never attracted much notice. I offer here the first discussion and edition of the passages in the belief that they shed new light on the sources and applications of liturgical commentary in late Anglo-Saxon England. Of equal or perhaps greater interest, the excerpts also include portions of the ordo for a pontifical mass on Christmas Day. The ordo, as we shall see, resists close dating or localization, but the very type of document has rarely survived in pre-Conquest English manuscripts and so merits attention. Both the expository and ordinal passages occasionally hint of access to unusual sources at some late Anglo-Saxon church, possibly Worcester cathedral during the pontificate of Wulfstan I (1002–16).

Latin passages in Irish vernacular law: notes on sources

Latin sentences and phrases are found in the early Irish vernacular Laws (ranging from Old-Irish commentaries to later gloss and commentary). Some sentences have parallels in the Hibernensis, itself related to earlier Hiberno-Latin florilegia. At times, the evidence suggests that the vernacular legists are drawing directly on Hiberno-Latin literature rather than the Hibernensis. These and other collections of aphorisms were, therefore, important for the early Irish canonists and of continued interest to the legists who wrote the vernacular Laws and commentaries.