Medieval Figure Research Articles

Spoiled History: Leprosy and the Lessons of Queer Medieval Historiography

Abstract White supremacists fetishize the crusading knight; queer theorists claim an identification with the generative secret of the premodern sodomite. This essay attends to the epistemological circuits of transhistorical identification, examining the claims of recursive history and the theories of attachment betrayed by identification with the medieval past. Turning away from the solicitations of the crusader and the sodomite, the essay excavates histories of emotional attachment to the leper, a medieval figure whose status as abject incarnation of historical distance helps reconfigure transhistoric emotional identification. In medieval texts, the leper's ruined face scripts styles of recognition. In the medical writings of nineteenth-century imperial physicians, the medieval leper is used in negotiating fears of disease outbreaks in various colonies. The leper therefore comes to assume the status of reassuring historical distance as a result of imperial ideological needs. Attention to the circuits of desire that animate claims to the past on the basis of identification and personal attachment can account for the attraction the Middle Ages exerts on both medievalists and white supremacists.

“Terrible Letters”: Bad Handwriting and its Implications, 1020–1220

This article focuses on the role of one of the most fundamental of medieval figures—the scribe, as well as on the products of scribes in the eighth to thirteenth centuries. It chiefly addresses how writing seems to have functioned and been conceived of and how present-day scholarly palaeographical methods do not always adjudicate medieval writing practices sensitively or convincingly. This matters, and especially so in our age of the digital aspect, since the inherited categories of description simply no longer hold force. What constitutes ‘bad handwriting’ then and is it, in fact, a description that can be validated by close analysis of scholarship and medieval writing practices?

The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

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The Variety of Similarity: Hungarian High Literature, History, and Folklore in the Lyrics of Dalriada

This article comprises a case study of the lyrical program of the Hungarian folk metal band Dalriada. I employ a close reading based method that relies on ideas drawn from reception studies, metal studies, history and literary studies toward an understanding of Dalriada’s reinterpretation of elements of Hungarian history (e.g., Medieval figures, the period of Ottoman occupation), folk traditions (e.g., folk songs) and high literature (the works of János Arany). I conclude by discussing some common patterns in these interpretations that run through Dalriada’s overall output.

BÜYÜK ALFRED DÖNEMİ ÜZERİNE BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

Alfred the Great is King of Wessex, reigning from 871 to 899. Alfred successfully defended his country against the the invasion and pilage attempt of Vikings and became the most powerful monarch in England until his death. Alfred is one of two British monarchs to hold the title of "Great". The other ruler with this title is Knud the Great, who Scandinavian origin. He was the first king to describe himself not only as the "King of the West Saxons" but als as the "King of the Anglo-Saxons" as a completly. Alfred the Great draws attention as one of the rare medieval figures whose popularity still continues today with his actions. Alfred's influence continued through the ages and was directly associated with British imperialism by some authors. Cultural and administrative developments during the reign of Alfred the Great attracted the attention of many authors. Alfred was famous as a merciful, gracious king who loved to learn, reorganized the legal system and military structure of his country with his reforms, and improved the quality of life of the people. Alfred made incentives for the dissemination of education in his country. However, he preferred English, not Latin, as the language of education in the country. The main purpose of our article is to provide a brief perspective on Alfred's life.

The vaidilutė: how Lithuanian Catholic youth made a pagan priestess Christian

ABSTRACT Combining literary analysis with historical study, this interdisciplinary article examines how, in interwar Lithuania, the Catholic youth organization Ateitis made use of the vaidilutė – a fabled pagan priestess that tended sacred fires in pre-Christian Lithuania – as an image assisting a newly emerging class of young educated Catholic women to envision their role in nation- and state-building. Analyzing the use of the vaidilutė in both dramatic productions put on by the Ateitis organization and in the magazine Naujoji Vaidilutė, the article investigates how this medieval figure functioned as a locus for negotiating national, religious, and gender identity.

Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today

Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today

A Crusader Duel at the Crystal Palace: The statues of Godfrey of Bouillon and Richard the Lionheart at the Great Exhibition

Abstract This article examines the display of two sculptures of medieval figures at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Those sculptures – Carlo Marochetti’s Richard Coeur de Lion and Eugène Simonis’ Godefroid de Bouillon – both honoured figures remembered as crusaders, and are better known in their permanent bronze versions that stand today in London and Brussels respectively. However, it is often overlooked that both works appeared at the exhibition, with Marochetti displaying his work on behalf of England, and Simonis exhibiting his on behalf of Belgium. Their appearance in 1851 stimulated a multi-faceted national rivalry, evidently encompassing both the two sculptors and the respective heads of state, Victoria and Leopold I of the Belgians. Drawing from written evidence and visual culture, this article traces the shared history of the sculptures at the Great Exhibition, before exploring contemporary responses to their appearance there. Its findings contribute to scholarly debates over the status of the Great Exhibition as either a peace congress or the catalyst for international competition, as well as to discussions over the cultural impact of the medieval past in the nineteenth century.

Ovid's Heroides 3 and the inventio of Criseyde in the Medieval Matter of Troy

Abstract In its focus on Briseis, Heroides 3 develops an amatory reading of the traffic in women depicted in the Iliad. Heroides 3 transmitted this Ovidian version of the Homeric Briseis to the Medieval West in the absence of the Homeric epics. The medieval story of Briseida as the lover of Troilus and Diomedes, derived from Dares's De excidio Troiae historia, intersected with medieval versions of Heroides 3, both in Latin and vernacular, resulting in the re-naming of Briseida as Criseyde in order to distinguish between the Ovidian and medieval figures.

King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne. By Janet L. Nelson (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2019) 668 pp. $34.95

Quoting Lewis Carroll, Nelson opens her biography of Charlemagne with the solemn advice of the King of Hearts, “Begin at the beginning…, and go on until you come to the end: then stop” (7). This is no literary affectation: Over the course of the next several hundred pages, Nelson tells the story of the Frankish king and Emperor Charles the Great in precisely this fashion. It is a measure of both the relative profusion of the sources and Nelson’s profound command of them that a biography of a single early medieval figure can indeed proceed for several hundred pages, beginning with Charles’ early life, continuing with his accession to sole rule of the Franks, his wars and conquests, his attempts to reform Frankish letters and manners, his court and family life, and finally his death and burial. Prominent throughout the book are contemporary and near-contemporary sources, often given in lengthy translated extracts and always accompanied by learned critique. This material is presented chronologically rather than thematically. In her introduction, Nelson justifies such a strictly sequential approach as a ploy to avoid teleology, and in this respect, she certainly succeeds, though the book’s organization does give it something of the feel of a textbook (see below).Given the book’s tight focus on the sources, however, the first order of business is to discuss how it handles them. The book uses a lot of sources, and Nelson’s commentary on them is both insightful and clearly written. Her interventions into extant historiographical debates have a light touch, universally thoughtful but calculated not to drown a casual reader in technicalities. The material that Nelson consults is largely textual. She brings in material evidence at points, and in a number of passages—notably the discussion of the archaeology of Aachen (356–359)—nonwritten sources receive the same kind of detailed analysis accorded to (for instance) letters or poetry. Within the written source material, Nelson switches with equal facility between many different genres. For example, in Chapter 10, she analyzes annals, abbatial gesta, miracle stories, letters, conciliar records, sacramentaries, legal collections, and theological tracts. Notwithstanding this variety of written sources, the traditional material of the historian acts as undisputed king for most of the book, with archaeology, numismatics, and so on serving as counselors rather than as co-rulers.The combination of tight chronological focus and meticulously source-based analysis, moreover, lends the book a certain bittiness, or fragmentation. Yet the “one thing at a time” approach has its downsides as well as its advantages. She certainly conveys a visceral impression of how many different things Charlemagne juggled at one time in a way that would have been lost in a more thematic book. Yet any sense of the overall trajectory of Charlemagne’s career can also get lost. Were this book a novel, the plot would be somewhat difficult to follow. Non-specialists may find themselves losing the wood for the trees, and specialists may find Nelson’s wider points to be a little opaque.Nonetheless, the sheer number of sources quoted at length—many untranslated elsewhere and a not insignificant number likely to be unfamiliar—as well as the learned commentary on both the translated and the untranslated sources means that the work lends itself perfectly for use as an undergraduate textbook. Specialists or non-specialists looking for an erudite, well-written, if narrowly focused, account of Charlemagne’s life will find much to like in this book; someone organizing an undergraduate course about the king may find this book to be the perfect complement.

EPIGRAPHY OF THE XII–XVIII CENTURIES FROM THE AGUL VILLAGE OF RICHA (NEW DATA)

In the abundance of epigraphic monuments and their historical and cultural significance, the ancient Aghul village of Richa stands out among other mountain villages and auls of Dagestan. The aim of this paper is to present the results of the study of Arabic inscriptions found in the village of Richa. More than twenty previously unknown inscriptions in various genres of epigraphy – construction, ownership and vital records, epitaphs and religious texts – have been for the first time introduced into modern linguistics. Notable among them are the most ancient monuments of Arabic Kufic writings, paleographically dated the XI-XII centuries, which testifies to the early popularization of Islam in Richa. In addition, the authors propose a new way of reading some of the Richa inscriptions that are already known to science. The presence of Kufic inscriptions on the walls of three mosques in Richa, as well as Naskh inscriptions dated 1242 on the walls of another mosque, suggest that mosques had existed in Richa even before the Mongols came here in 1239. Researchers have revealed the oldest dated epitaph in Richa (1300–01) in which the term alim (scholar) was used for the first time in the epigraphy of Dagestan. New valuable data have been obtained on the history of construction and reconstruction of Muslim places of worship, mausoleums, sanctuaries, and public buildings. Names of many local craftsmen, carvers and calligraphers have become known. The inscriptions contain valuable information on representatives of the medieval religious elites and Sufi figures. The rich social and professional terminology used in the newly identified Richa inscriptions is also of interest: sultan, shaykh, pir, murid, alim, qadi, ustad (usta), qatib, nakir, sahib, gulam, kavha. Translations of the texts are accompanied by scientific comments.

The Agonistic Poetics of D\u0101sya-bh\u0101va: the Soteriological Confrontation Between Deity and Devotee

The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, emotions, and affectivities. We will highlight the dialectic in the devotional songs of three medieval figures, Tulsīdās (c. 1600), Sūrdās (c. 1600), and Mādhavadeva (1489–1596), which are structured primarily by the devotional attitude of a servant (dāsa) towards the Lord. As we will see, this theological servitude is not to be understood as a form of abject servility, for the three poets, in their somewhat distinctive ways, can not only speak of the Lord as a friend and as a lover, but can even level various kinds of complaints, challenges, and accusations at the Lord. Thus, if the Lord’s transcendental sovereignty is emphasised by the devotee through the modes of self-censure, the Lord’s immanent availability is also highlighted through the protests that the devotee fervently makes to the seemingly uncaring Lord.

The Long Genocide in Upper Mesopotamia: Minority Population Destruction amidst Nation-Building and “International Security”

“Genocide in Kurdistan” most often refers to events that are recognized as having occurred in Iraq during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Scholars also connect it with events in Turkey’s early years as a republic. This article describes how some scholars’ expansive conception of Kurdistan encompasses regions that also witnessed genocides as large as or larger (in quantitative terms) than these two cases. Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, Mandaeans, Shi’i Arabs, and Greek Orthodox Christians witnessed extermination campaigns at various points in Ottoman, Persian, Iraqi, and Turkish history. What is remarkable about Upper Mesopotamia is that these genocides may have reduced native populations in absolute numbers, as compared with ancient or early medieval figures, and to a greater extent than after the genocides of the Kurds or other groups. Like the work of Raphael Lemkin, this article’s analysis will not be limited to the period since the Genocide Convention entered into force. Instead, it presents evidence of continuities between the denationalization strategies, official pretexts, and regions mentioned in histories of the various genocides in Upper Mesopotamia.

The Magdalene in the Reformation by Margaret Arnold

Reviewed by: The Magdalene in the Reformation by Margaret Arnold Beth Kreitzer The Magdalene in the Reformation. By Margaret Arnold. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. 300 pp. An object of seemingly endless fascination and opinion, Mary Magdalene is the focus of this book. While Mary—the “apostle to the apostles” for her role in first witnessing and then announcing the risen Jesus—has been more thoroughly studied by historians of the medieval period, less is known of her image in the early modern era, despite the fact that the increasing skepticism toward saintly legend and veneration of the period is well known. In her wide-ranging study, Arnold portrays the transformation of the dramatic image of the medieval Magdalene—a composite figure of three women in the gospels, Mary of Bethany (who had famously chosen the “better portion” than her sister Martha), the “sinful” woman of Luke 7, usually assumed to be a repentant prostitute, and the Mary from Magdala most known for being the first to encounter Jesus after his resurrection (the medieval Magdalene also incorporated a number of legendary accretions that appear to have been less significant in early modern texts). Arnold notes that the discovery or thesis that the medieval figure of Mary of Magdala was in fact a composite of three separate women, first proposed by the humanist and biblical scholar Lefèvre d’Étaples in 1517, had less impact than one might have thought. Most interpreters continued to accept the traditional image of the composite Mary. Arnold helpfully surveys a large amount of material by a wide variety of authors, and organizes her text by religious community, with chapters on Lutheran, Reformed, Radical, and Evangelical perspectives on the Magdalene, as well as two chapters (one focusing particularly on female authors) on Roman Catholic perspectives. She tackles the assumption that Mary Magdalene would have [End Page 440] been dismissed from Protestant attention in its general critique and discontinuation of the cult of the saints. Arnold discovers that not only does Mary survive among Protestants, she even thrives as an important role model. Interestingly her image is also transformed among Catholic audiences, reflecting broader changes in the transition from medieval to modern European culture. The Magdalene figured frequently in debates surrounding issues central to reform: justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, preaching by lay people, and questions surrounding appropriate roles and vocations for women. Her image, one that Arnold notes has less “flexibility [than] it had in medieval piety” (240), is still flexible enough that Christians on all sides of the confessional divides could continue to embrace and use it. For Protestants, Mary Magdalene was a model of the redeemed sinner saved by grace alone, while for Catholics she participated in her own redemption through serving Christ. As witness of the resurrection and apostola apostolorum, Protestants could champion Mary’s role as a pious and faithful lay Christian witnessing publicly to her own faith. While Catholics (even female religious such as Teresa of Ávila) avoided references to female preaching, which was already closely associated with certain Protestant—and heretical— communities, they stressed Mary’s intimate relationship with Christ, one available particularly to religious women in convents. But although Mary of Bethany, as opposed to her sister Martha, was once seen as the foremost exemplar for nuns, in the writings of Teresa and later female Catholic authors the religious life was now seen as one combining aspects of both Mary and Martha—the active and the contemplative. Arnold brings a sensitive analysis to the many texts and contexts that she investigates, presenting a thorough and complex image of a transformed Mary Magdalene. The book will be useful to scholars of this period, but also accessible to a general audience interested in how people of the past read and interpreted the Bible. [End Page 441] Beth Kreitzer Marymount California University Rancho Palos Verdes, California Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

Intertextuality in Daniel Kehlmann’s Novel Tyll

Intertextuality in Daniel Kehlmann’s Novel Tyll Marc J. Schweissinger Abstract This article examines intertextuality in the novel Tyll, by Daniel Kehlmann, from 2017. The Name Tyll refers to the old medieval figure Till Eulenspiegel. Eulenspiegel, a real-life character became popular through folk songs of the 15th and 16th centuries in Germany, but Kehlmann creates a historical novel, placing his Tyll in the Thirty Years‟ War (1618–1648), a war tormenting central Europe. Kehlmann employs literary borrowings from the original rough farce and Charles De Coster‟s world-famous version of the 19th century, The Legend of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak. But while De Coster presented his Till as a freedom fighter for the Protestant Netherlands against Catholic Spanish oppression, Kehlmann pictures an entirely different character. Moreover, in contrast to the rough farce, Kehlmann equips his Tyll with an individual biography. Tyll, suffering from childhood trauma, runs away from home and becomes a travelling artist. Caught up by the whirlwind of the Thirty Years‟ War, unprotected by law, Tyll turns from an able trickster similar to the character from the popular folk song into a fool for the so-called Winter King of Bohemia, Frederick V. Kehlmann creates an intertextual riddle, shifting back and forward in time, deliberately full of flaws and conceptual loopholes. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v7n1a16

‘Looking after them, reading in Homer’: Thomas Goffe’s Turk Plays in Oxford

This article discusses two Turk plays of Thomas Goffe that were performed at Christ Church in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and subsequently printed: the plays present events from late medieval history, but with extensive classical allusion. The article considers the plays’ use of theatrical reference and books as props: these devices may have encouraged a particular response in the academic audiences who first saw these plays, especially influencing their attitude to the Turkish emperors who are fictionalised presentations of historical medieval figures, exotic, religiously and culturally ‘other’, but also made familiar by their contextualisation among the figures of a classical past, the study of which was the foundation of Tudor education.

‘Cartoonish lumps’: the surface appeal of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?”

ABSTRACTA reviewer for The Wall Street Journal dismisses what he calls the ‘cartoonish lumps’ of the Medieval St. Albans figures at the Getty Center. He accuses the artist of childishness: as if the artist did not yet know, developmentally, how to draw. ‘Their creators hadn’t yet figured out how to make human beings look human. Their faces are expressionless and dumb (eyes are white circles with black dots in the middle) … Their attenuated bodies … are devoid of musculature or fat’. Such a critique defends against the amplified affective states conjured by these images. Drawing on psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s theories of the ‘skin-ego’ and surface, this article reflects upon the childlike ‘simplicity’ of the lines shared by these ‘cartoonish’ figures, and the bold, spare lines of Alison Bechdel’s graphic narratives. Bechdel summons affective regions conjured by the flattened surface of the seeming two-dimensional figures, layered against bubbled, staccato scripts. The childlike simplicity of Bechdel’s renderings of the human figure allows an affective resonance and, ironically, a longing for the transcendent, enigmatic, and impenetrable realm invoked by the gaze of the Medieval figure.

Old Roots, new routes: following the troubadour in the poetry of Dennis Brutus

Literary critics routinely associate the poetry of the South African writer Dennis Brutus (1924–2009) with the medieval European figure of the troubadour. This article examines the presence of this image in his poetry, both as a motif and as a poetic persona, and explores the reasons why he chose to use the troubadour. It also investigates to what extent Brutus remains faithful to historical accounts of the troubadours and their defining characteristics, and how he transforms these romantic figures from another time and place to suit his own poetic objectives. I contend that Brutus’s use of the troubadour persona is fraught with tensions and contradictions, and I discuss some of the criticism that his deployment of the troubadour figure has attracted. Even though the choice of this persona is in some ways problematic, for both cultural and political reasons, any assessment of Brutus’s poetry cannot ignore its presence. The troubadour remains a vital aspect of the thinking that informed and inspired his writing. Keywords: Dennis Brutus, troubadour, South African protest poetry

The Devil's Coach House and Skeleton Cave: Colonial Tales, the Medieval Demonic, and the Absence of the Indigenous

ABSTRACT The Jenolan Caves, west of Sydney, Australia, first came to the notice of European settlers in the late 1830s. Their “discovery” and exploration was presented as a tale of daring settlers, intrepid travelers, desperate bushrangers, and even a medieval demonic figure drawn from the European Christian imaginary, for whom a large cavern was named the Devil's Coach House. Also evident, however, is a silence regarding the Indigenous history of this area—until the discovery in 1903 of the bones of an Indigenous person calcified into the floor of a cave, consequently named the Skeleton Cave. Yet the history of New South Wales in this period was one of bloody massacres of Indigenous people. This article explores how this history, though repressed, erupts in the naming processes of the Jenolan Caves, and how the Indigenous reappears as a revenant, displaced onto other aliens of settler society—bushrangers, convicts, and the Devil himself.

Review: Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age, by Zeynep Yürekli

Zeynep Yurekli Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies series, Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012, 222 pp., 57 b/w illus. £70, ISBN 9781409411062 By examining the patronage and remodeling of two Anatolian shrine complexes, Zeynep Yurekli addresses the historical, religious, and ideological complexities that shaped the political and spiritual geography of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century. A specific form of architectural patronage at the shrines, which were built to venerate medieval religious figure Haci Bektas Veli and eighth-century warrior saint Seyyid Battal Gazi, shaped the architecture at the important Anatolian centers that housed the saints’ tombs and attendant communities of dervishes. These were places of pilgrimage visitation, known in Turkish as ziyaretler . The sites sat on the borders of regional principalities, or beylikler , that were formed following the Mongol conquest of Anatolia in 1243 and were eventually brought into the Ottoman Empire. Yurekli posits that the shrines subsequently became key sites in a “Bektashi network” that grew between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to include more than 150 such sites, all under the centralized governance of the leaders of the Haci Bektas Veli shrine in central Anatolia. Such shrines, dedicated to saints venerated by Anatolian Muslims, dotted the Ottoman landscape. In many cases, the tombs of these exemplary figures became parts of large complexes that included facilities for dervishes in Sufi orders; kitchens and bakeries for supplying food to initiates, pilgrims, festival attendees, travelers, and the poor; systems of running water piped to pools and fountains as well as to residential and educational buildings; and ceremonial spaces. The architecture of the Turco-Mongol tradition of saint veneration was multifunctional and often cumulative, as structures were added, remodeled, and reoriented over time, sometimes over several centuries. This …