Medieval Christian Europe Research Articles

THE INFORMATIC IMAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ART

This text focuses on the dominant visual culture current policies, its relationship with the market and the partnership of this relationship with art. Information (visual) that indicates the actions of storing and disseminating information is a traditional form of activity that all cultures frequently resort to through art, from the first ages to the present. Because it is known that the functionality of the image is encountered even in cave painting in the history of civilization and the first data are these paintings built with communicative concern. Nevertheless, the real (purposeful) informatic image emerges in church murals in medieval Christian Europe. These (communicative) images, which emerge as an activity of the dominant system to convey itself, are informatic messages in terms of the meaning they are loaded. Accordingly, the image is always communicative between culture, market, system and individual. With this aspect, image is a type of information that enters the field of visual culture and turns into a kind of communication opportunity and it is clear that this has a transdisciplinary feature. As it can be understood, from the depths of civilization history to the present, visuality is a part of the activity of directing/managing the masses. It is also obvious that these possibilities have changed according to the visual culture instruments of the age. Like defined above, the individual interacting with the system according to the needs of the age is under the control of cultural relations networks. In this context, McLuhan pays attention in her text Medium is the Messages that the social structure came under the control of the media in the 1960s. Today, it can be said that this situation is beyond what the author claims and that the age of visual culture we live in has absorbed all the components from art to design, from artist to designer, from individual to society, into the system. Thus, a universe picture emerged in which almost all cultural productions turn into fictions that are blessed/glorified in terms of being art and/or design; in this universe built in the possibility of visual culture, visuality, which has a transdisciplinary character, has turned into a kind of communication opportunity.

Britain in the Awareness of Muslim Literature; Early Historical and Geographical Knowledge until the time of al-Idrīsī (217 AH/ 833 CE – 560 AH/ 1165 CE)

Muslim authors paid a significant interest in European peoples and countries in the view of growing the relationship between Muslim World and Medieval Christian Europe and the flourish of authorship in Muslim scholarship. In fact, a part of the Muslim's interest was given to the British Isles in spite of it is far distance of Muslim lands. Therefore, the present article focuses on principle significant questions; what was Britain for early Muslim authors? and what were the most important reasons for interesting those Muslim authors in it, and what were the most effective factors contributing in developing such interest until the mid-6th AH/ 12th century CE when the geographer al-Idrīsī was alive. Hence, the researcher has to investigate the beginnings of the term "Britain" in Muslim traditional sources since the establishment of authorship in the Muslim world, particularly during first quarter of the 3rd AH/ 9th CE century when the first reference to "Marṭāniyah" was recorded. The al-Idrīsī's account on the British Isles is worthy to examine since he sheds light on its major islands, described in detail the most important British towns and cities in his time, and some of its well-known rivers. He also tried to determine the distances between some of these cities and towns by the mile, with some references to political and economic conditions in the British Isles in his time. All that clarifies the extent of early Muslim interest in the British Isles, seeming limited to the geographical knowledge among most Muslim writings during the period under study.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff (review)

Reviewed by: Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff Magda Teter Paola Tartakoff. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000271 Those familiar with sources from medieval Christian Europe will not be surprised that some Christians converted to Judaism. The Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades include glimpses and allusions to them, and many papal letters and bulls express anxiety over Jewish-Christian proximity and the resulting conversions. But aside from a handful of articles about such conversions in the premodern periods, there is no systematic monograph on the subject. Paola Tartakoff's book seeks to fill this lacuna, exploring a variety of sources—legal and literary—from across Europe—north and south—and across centuries. Tartakoff disentangles conversions of those she calls "born Christians" from Jews who had converted to Christianity and decided to return to the fold. Jews considered these two types of conversion as different acts and processes—giyyur for the conversion to Judaism and ḥazarah bi-teshuvah for return to the fold. For Christians these were not distinct; they represented a rejection of Christianity—an apostasy. But these two conversions were sometimes intertwined. To tie different geographies, chronologies, and themes together, Tartakoff frames the book around "the Norwich circumcision case," in which several Norwich Jews were accused in 1234 of having circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy, named Edward, four years prior. This became a protracted trial that ended in 1240 with the execution of three of the accused Jews and expulsion of several others. This was likely, as Sara Lipton has suggested, a case of a child of a Jewish convert to Christianity, perhaps in a custody battle, whom Jews may have been trying to bring back into the community by "making him a Jew." The accusation was apparently first considered in a royal court before being transferred to an ecclesiastical court. One of the beneficiaries of the Jews' conviction was the child's father, Benedict, who received a part of the confiscated property. The Norwich circumcision case is a puzzle. Tartakoff seeks to unpack the story by locating it "in contemporary anti-Jewish discourse" and the "thirteenth-century trend of prosecuting Jews on charges of having preyed on a Christian boy" (5–6). While there was no effort during court proceedings to connect Edward's supposed circumcision with anti-Jewish murder libels, which had emerged in the twelfth century in England (indeed, in Norwich itself) and began to spread across the continent in the thirteenth century, this link would be made some years later in a chronicle by Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk at St. Alban's (d. 1259). What remains puzzling is that neither the surviving court records nor Matthew Paris's chronicle evoke the story of William of Norwich, whose death in 1144 led to the rise, decades later, of the first anti-Jewish narrative of murder libel, with even a shrine apparently established in the town. Instead, in the court documents Edward is likened to St. Giles (51). This deafening silence about William of Norwich, unaddressed by Tartakoff, suggests that perhaps William's story was already forgotten, but more importantly, that Edward's reported circumcision was not seen through the lens of these early anti-Jewish libels. [End Page 469] Tartakoff's reading of the case seems forced, even anachronistic. For example, discussing a small knife said to have been used in Edward's supposed circumcision, Tartakoff notes that "these implements figured prominently in host desecration and ritual murder narratives" (56). A similar point is made about a Christian woman, Matilda, who reportedly rescued Edward. She played, Tartakoff claims, "roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration" (57). But by 1234, the date of the court summary, or even 1240, the date of the execution, aside from the apparently lost narrative of William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, there was no developed anti-Jewish discourse that could have colored the lens through which Edward's case would have been seen. Host desecration stories emerged later in the thirteenth century, and murder libels would become much more entrenched in European and English imagination...

Zsidó foglalkozások a Római Birodalomban

As is well known in modern western societies, certain professions and trades have attracted inordinately large numbers of Jews. As is also well  known, in medieval Christian Europe Jews were allowed to pursue only a limited number of occupations. In antiquity, however, Jews did not segregate themselves, and were not segregated by general society, in their occupations. Th e economic profi le of the Jews of antiquity seems to have been identical to that of their gentile neighbors, whether in the diaspora or in the land of Israel. Jews in Rome were widely reputed to be beggars, but no ancient source suggests that all beggars were Jews or that all Jews were beggars. Jews perhaps abstained from certain occupations that would have brought them into contact with the gods and religious ceremonies of the gentiles, but, as far as is known, they did not concentrate in particular professions or devote themselves to particular trades. Th ere were no „Jewish” occupations in antiquity.

‘Like Adam and Eve’: Biblical Models and Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Christian Europe

This article follows the exegetical and legal interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve among Jewish scholars of the High Middle Ages living in northern Europe. It argues that by following these evolving interpretations and understandings one can tease out details of the fabric of everyday Jewish life alongside tensions and norms that were under debate. It focuses on two main aspects of these reinterpretations. The first is understandings concerning conjugal life and gender hierarchies. The second is legal rights and responsibilities accorded to women as ‘daughters of Eve.’

Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz

Scholars regularly refer to independently operating Jewish courts as prime evidence of Jewish autonomy and self-rule in medieval Christian Europe. Yet few have focused on the largely anonymous individuals who populated these forums, despite the vital role that litigants played in fueling the judicial system. This article joins a growing body of research devoted to a bottom-up examination of the institutions of law and justice in premodern Europe, highlighting the activities of those who made use of the courts rather than the structures that authorized them. Specifically, it considers a divorce suit adjudicated in the mid-thirteenth century by the rabbinic court of Rabbi Hezkiah b. Jacob of Magdeburg as a lens onto the legal knowledge of lay litigants, their expectations of the judicial system, and the litigation strategies they developed. The reactions of R. Hezkiah and his colleagues to these tactics demonstrate that litigation in the Jewish courts not only reflected current legal trends but could also affect them.

The Roots of Chaadaev’s Philosophical Thought

Pierwsza eurocentryczna koncepcja filozofii historii została stworzona przez Piotra Czaadajewa. Według tego chrześcijańskiego myśliciela jej ideał najlepiej odzwierciedlała średniowieczna Europa. Czaadajew czytał Kanta, Hegla i Schellinga, ale to francuscy filozofowie katoliccy: de Maistre, de Bonald, Ballanche, Chateaubriand i Lamennais, wywarli na niego największy wpływ. Specyficzny rodzaj konserwatywnego okcydentalizmu Czaadajewa charakteryzowało oskarżenie społeczeństwa rosyjskiego o brak tradycji, które mogłyby identyfikować Rosję z historią Europy. Według Czaadajewa kulturę rosyjską charakteryzuje brak ciągłości; nowe pomysły pojawiają się niespodziewanie, są pozbawione podstaw i brak im tradycji wcześniejszych pokoleń. Fakt ten był krytykowany w latach czterdziestych XIX wieku przez okcydentalistów, którzy kontynuowali liberalną i racjonalistyczną tradycję XVIII wieku. W 1839 roku konserwatywni słowianofile opowiedzieli się za hierarchią wartości Czaadajewa, odrzucając jego pesymistyczny pogląd na przyszłość Rosji. Spotkało się z otwartą krytyką okcydentalistów związanych z Bielińskim. Jednak wkrótce reakcje nacjonalistyczne zdominowały słowianofilów, którzy gloryfikowali wyjątkowość rosyjskiego ducha narodowego i opowiadali się za samodzielnością Rosji. Jednym z głównych źródeł nieporozumień między okcydentalistami i słowianofilami była rola XVIII‑­wiecznego cara Piotra I. Mimo że Czaadajew nie zauważał żadnych spektakularnych wzlotów w historii Rosji ani siły narodu rosyjskiego w przeszłości, stał się on wyrazicielem znamienitej przyszłości swojego kraju. W Apologii obłąkanego, która została napisana, aby rozładować napiętą atmosferę spowodowaną publikacją pierwszego listu filozoficznego, Czaadajew wyraża afirmację wielkiej misji Rosji. Według myśliciela Rosja ujawni swój ukryty potencjał i siłę i stanie się przewodniczką życia duchowego w Europie. Czaadajew, który wierzył w mistyczną misję Rosji, pod koniec swego życia uznał również wielkość prawosławia.

Nuevos datos sobre la temprana difusión del ajedrez en los Pirineos, y una reflexión sobre las piezas de Àger = New evidences on the early spread of chess in the Pyrenees, and a consideration about the Àger set.

The oldest documents revealing the spread of chess in medieval Christian Europe come from the Catalan counties and the Eastern Pyrenees. The aim of this paper is to add two new documentary evidences which confirm the presence of rock crystal chess pieces both in the abbey of Santa Maria de Ripoll and in the cathedral of Roda de Isabena. Additionally, the present study tries to reexamine our current knowledge regarding the exceptional set of pieces coming from the collegiate church of Sant Pere in Ager, suggesting it may have been a donation from one of the descendants of Arnau Mir de Tost, who were the viscounts of Ager of the Cabrera family and later became counts of Urgell.

Toledo Çevirmenler Okulu'nda gerçekleştirilen çalışmaların kültürlerarası yeri ve önemi

This work examines the contribution of studies that took place between 12th and 13th century in the “Toledo School of Translators” to world culture and the history of translation. It explains how different cultures that form the world heritage interact with and transform each other through translation. Important philosophers, scientists, and translators who assumed the role of cultural ambassadors of their era are examined via particular translations and translation methods. The centuries-old effects of Islamic sages on Medieval Christian Europe can be detected through the process in which the East Islamic culture and philosophy translated from Arabic into Latin in Toledo is acquired by European culture. In our work, historical and social conditions that facilitated the studies in “The Toledo School of Translators” will be discussed while emphasizing the era's other particular culture and translation centers such as Paris, Italy, and Baghdad. Certainly, King Alfonso X's support had a massive impact on creating mature conditions for this issue. The role achieved by translation in cultural politics was indisputably improved by Alfonso X, who also established schools in the other cities of Spain. While the starting point of our work in this context is the studies conducted in the “Toledo School of Translators” and the scientists and the philosophers who labored in these studies, the sources that we will use in the course of our study will be the works by eminent scholars of history, culture and literature that came out from two geographies - the Iberian and Anatolian Peninsula.

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (review)

Reviewed by: Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present Lawrence Besserman Miriamne Ara Krummel. Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xix, 243. $85.00. Long in gestation, this study has more strengths than weaknesses. The principal strength of Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England is that it surveys an impressive variety of texts and images from the twelfth century through the fifteenth and illuminates the theme of Jewish otherness in medieval England and the theme of the “Other” in medieval Christian Europe in general. Using postcolonial insights (via the work of Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others), Miriamne Krummel starts out by linking the mimicry and displacement of Judaism in a contemporary anti-Judaic cartoon with the same ambivalent movement of mimicry and displacement in medieval anti-Judaic supersessionism. Setting the stage, Krummel writes: “Reading Jewishness through the intersection of imaginative and archival works enables me to see that English Jews were not at all absent from medieval English society as was commonly believed—a belief that is ever losing currency among contemporary medievalists” (8). This is promising, but in fact Krummel’s “spectral” Jews receive most of the attention. To be sure, the Rolls are helpfully scanned for the “presence” of absent Jews in place-names that refer to “superseded” Jewish ownership. But for Krummel (following Biddick, Fradenburg, Kruger, and others), Jews are either “absent” or “erased,” or present mainly in archival memory. Fortunately, Krummel also sees past the specters and adduces evidence of actual Jews present after the 1290 expulsion, citing records in the Patent Rolls that prove that “the English land [sic] and its Court [End Page 416] probably welcomed Jews so long as the King desired their presence” (12). Acknowledging that England was not entirely Judenrein or “Jew-clean” after 1290, Krummel’s thesis is that “neither the 1290 Expulsion nor scriptural typology completely prevented living Jewishness from appearing on the medieval English landscape” (14). How could that happen? Their lands had been expropriated, their presence outlawed—Where was “living Jewishness” to be found? Krummel suggests answers to these questions that will enliven the scholarly conversation. In Chapter 1, Krummel explicates Edward I’s Statute of Jewry (1275) and the “racialist impulses in eight thirteenth-century English pictorials [i.e., manuscript illustrations] and one fourteenth-century doodle” (23). As previous scholars have noted, these and similar images and statutes all coincide in defining Jews as bestial, the quintessential, less-than-human “Other.” Krummel’s contribution is to introduce a postmodern perspective on these familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes by way of theories of agency, the body, the gaze, the panopticon, hybridity, and essentialism. Chapter 2 treats the liturgical poetry (Heb. piyyutim) of Meir, son of Elijah of Norwich (fl. c. 1290), focusing especially on Meir’s “Put a Curse on My Enemy.” This text reflects Meir’s “attempt to reclaim agency and to become a witness to his own experiences” (63). Catastrophes call up memories of earlier catastrophes. As Krummel says, “[r]e-seeing and re-membering the 1290 English Expulsion of the Jews through the enormity of the twentieth-century Holocaust are not so much myopic as they are inevitable” (65). Juxtaposing these two Jewish traumatic events may indeed “complicate our understanding of both periods,” but the awkwardly expressed claim that it does so “by giving us a glimpse of a medieval Jews’ [sic] internalization of invisibility and trauma in Meir’s piyyut” (66) falls flat. In this chapter, page after page repeats large portions of Krummel’s 2009 article on Meir of Norwich, partially revised but often cited word for word, and not listed in the bibliography (see Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4 [2009]: 1–23). In Chapter 3, on Mandeville’s Travels and the “postcolonial moment” (Tomasch), Krummel provides a sensitive reading of a uniquely intriguing text, “in which Jewishness appears only as deeply buried within the Caspian Mountains” (69). Throughout his travelogue, Mandeville [End Page 417] expresses, as Krummel shrewdly says, “a simultaneous fascination with and a repulsion to difference” (69). If this chapter errs on the...

Shared Stories and Religious Rhetoric: R. Judah the Pious, Peter the Chanter and a Drought

Abstract This article discusses a story about a Jewish-Christian interaction during a drought that appears in Peter the Chanter’s Verbum abbreviatum and R. Judah the Pious’ Sefer Hasidim. I suggest that the two authors had a common source, noting that Peter’s version was earlier so that R. Judah might have based his story on an account based on Peter the Chanter’s story, whether oral or written. Analyzing the tale, the article points to narrative strategies used by both authors and to what they can tell us about Jewish and Christian knowledge of each other’s religious practice and belief in medieval Christian Europe.

Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East

What the Anglo-Saxons “knew” about Asia and its inhabitants was drawn from Biblical exegesis, saints' lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English and Anglo-Latin texts of varied genre and contents give evidence of an intense interest in the East that serves both to define Anglo-Saxon origins and to depict outsiders of varying types that are made to perform as “Other” to members of the Anglo-Saxon community. Ælfric follows Augustine and Isidore in his division of the world into three regions whose people are descended from the biblical Ham, Shem, and Cham; the division is depicted in Anglo-Saxon world maps and referenced in poetry such as the Old English Genesis. The Beowulf-manuscript contains several texts about “the East” including the prose Wonders of the East, Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Life of Saint Christopher, as well as the poems Judith and Beowulf. The outlandish creatures described and illustrated in each of these texts figure as outsiders to Anglo-Saxon culture and function to structure masculinity and social cohesion. Images of monstrosity are interwoven with figurations of femininity to bring the ideation of the “other” closer to home. Old English texts that refer to “the East” have more to do with Anglo-Saxon preoccupations with locating themselves geographically and temporally in Christian Europe than with historical realities. “The East” becomes at once monstrous, marvellous, and mysterious, a place of the imagination in quasi-historical accounts ranging from the Letter of Alexander to Beowulf, each of which depicts a realm whose wild characters and characteristics opposed the wished-for stability of roles and functions “at home” among the English. With all of these figurations existing together in a single manuscript, it becomes possible to argue that Asia as a whole functions in the same position to medieval Christian Europe in a comprehensive fashion, anticipating the “orientalism” of the post-medieval period.

Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz and Premodern Poland

Converts to the faith have often been perceived as somewhat problematic by Judaism; apostates even more so.1 This was especially true in medieval Christian Europe, where the adversarial relationship between Christianity and Judaism made apostasy, particularly apostasy by choice, more than mere defection; it cast aspersions on the rejected religion.

The biblical drama of medieval Europe

This book presents a detailed survey and analysis of the surviving corpus of biblical drama from all parts of medieval Christian Europe. Over five hundred plays from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries are examined, in a wide-ranging discussion which makes available the full scope of this important part of theatre history. The volume is specially organised to provide a complete overview of major aspects of medieval biblical theatre, including: the theatrical community of both audience and players; the major plays and cycles; and the legacy of medieval biblical theatre. The book also includes valuable appendices with information on the liturgical calendar, processions, the Mass and the Bible. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe is a valuable resource for scholars and students of medieval theatre and for enthusiasts of early drama.

Visages du judaïsme: de la barbe en monde juif et de l'élaboration de ses significations

Au cours de l'été 1925, Schmuel Yosef Agnon, écrivain hébreu originaire de Galicie (et futur lauréat du prix Nobel de littérature) âgé alors de trentesept ans, revenait progressivement au mode de vie traditionnel dans lequel il avait été élevé. Écrivant de Jérusalem à sa femme, demeurée provisoirement en Allemagne, il lui fit part d'un incident survenu la veille et qui avait, par conséquent, conservé toute sa fraîcheur dans sa mémoire.

Christians and Jews-Some Positive Images

The dean of contemporary Jewish historians, S. W. Baron, has shown that many modern conceptions of Jewish experience in medieval Christian Europe suffer from a fundamental distortion. Writing history was not a natural vocation for medieval Jews; most Jewish historiography was inspired by calamities that generated the impulse to record and, if possible, to explain. Therefore, most medieval Jewish chronicles are little more than accounts of the massacres and attacks suffered by various communities at different times. The tendency to assume that these historiographical sources present a full picture of reality resulted in what Baron called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” viewing medieval Jewish experience as essentially a succession of tragedies in a vale of tears.