Medieval Narrative Research Articles

:Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the “Other” and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources

:<i>Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the “Other” and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources</i>

Art, illusion, and recycled images in Johannes Pauli’s anecdotes on painters

This article considers selected book illustrations that were published in the 1530s by Augsburg printer Heinrich Steiner. It compares Steiner’s choice of images for Schimpff und Ernst (1534), a popular anthology of entertaining and serious anecdotes compiled by the Franciscan preacher Johannes Pauli, with woodcuts that Steiner had previously employed in newly translated, moral–philosophical texts by Cicero and Petrarch. Although all three texts problematize the art of painting according to classical and medieval narratives, which urge caution in viewing lifelike images, each proposes diverse solutions for regarding illusionistic works of art. Whereas prior studies focus on the intentions of individual authors, this article highlights the printer–publisher’s agency. One image recycled in disparate works speaks to art’s multifaceted functions for upper-class, lay readers. This article argues that Steiner’s selection of images inserts Pauli’s chapter on artists and illusionistic painting into ongoing debates in Reformation-era Germany about the proper role of images in religious ritual. This cross-reading of image–text pairings in the early 1530s offers insights into the complexity of period attitudes towards visual art, the painter’s profession, and the beholder’s responsibilities.

Vidění znaku a účinnost slova. Turnaj ve staročeské povídce o Štilfridovi

The bulk of the Old Czech prose tale of Štilfrid (preserved in three manuscripts from the post-Hussite period and in early modern chapbooks) consists of a tournament in which the protagonist triumphs over twelve representatives of an enemy king, killing most of them. The present study builds in particular on the work of Jaroslav Kolár and Michel Stanesco and examines this tournament as a semantic spectacle. In doing so, it focuses primarily on the connections between the names and coats of arms present in the story and other medieval narratives, and shows how Štilfrid’s verbal and physical prowess and specific virtue (dangerously bordering on sinful pride) are construed through them.

Animal sauvage sauve enfant abandonné

&lt;p&gt;In a series of medieval narratives in which a newborn child is adopted or abducted by a wild animal to feed and protect, the twists and turns of the adventure culminate in the reuniting of the estranged family, through a process of socialization after a journey through savagery. For some, the challenge of this voyage is access to holiness. In these texts, the topos “WILD ANIMAL SAVES ABANDONED CHILD” stems from two topical situations that it synthesizes. The first refers to stories of which a founding example for Western culture is that of the she-wolf who takes in and nurses Romulus and Remus. The second is the hagiographical account of Saint Eustace’s legend.&lt;/p&gt;

Tales of Migration in Medieval Hungary

Abstract Medieval Hungary has been called a “guestland” because of the multiplicity of immigrant peoples living in the realm. Yet the real experiences of immigrants and narrative constructions about immigration were not always in sync. This article explores medieval tales of different types of migration into the Kingdom of Hungary: first, the mythic migration of the entire people (gens) from a supposed original homeland to a new territory; second, the family histories of noble immigrants; and finally representations of mass immigration into the Christian kingdom. To understand how medieval authors constructed such tales, we need to identify the models they used and the purposes such stories served. Biblical and literary sources inspired the story of “the Hungarians,” while noble families sought to increase their prestige by identifying early immigrant ancestors. In neither case can these medieval narratives be used as historical sources without fully engaging with their genesis. The analysis of explicit medieval reflections on the arrival of various groups into the Kingdom of Hungary also reveals how immigration could be seen in both positive and negative ways. Resting on these medieval foundations, tales of migration have persisted into the present, but they have also gained a sharper distinction: old migration is valorized, while new migration is demonized and instrumentalized in a brutally exclusionary way.

Imaging the Middle Ages: Twenty-First Century Revitalizations at Santiago de Compostela

Abstract: Since the Middle Ages, Santiago de Compostela has been home to one of the most famous pilgrimage destinations in Europe. Throughout its history, its success as a pilgrimage site has most often been signaled by large-scale building projects. This essay addresses how Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (CCG), an architectural complex and cultural center overlooking Santiago de Compostela, mediates and responds to contemporary efforts toward the production and revitalization of the pilgrim experience within the city. While not as obvious as the interventions that occur along the route, the CCG is in fact a materialization of the goals of the revitalization initiative, a vision of secularized touristic pilgrimage for the twenty-first century, which is enacted through Compostela's successful image economy. The twentieth-century revitalization efforts are peculiar for the distinctive nature of their engagement with a medieval past, and the strong connections drawn between modern pilgrimage and its medieval counterpart. This article is concerned with the material evidence of competing interests in the revitalization process and specifically with how they relate to institutional interventions initiated by the regional government. The regional government's interests were often pursued in monumental form: in the late twentieth century, the Xunta operationalized a comprehensive cultural policy that was principally enacted in architecture. Examining the CCG's own past, as well as the medieval narrative of Compostela's history that it materializes, offers a new framework for understanding the role of built space in—and its relation to—the politics of pilgrimage revitalization within the twenty-first-century context.

Presence of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Construction of the Medieval Narrative on Money

RESUMO Limitando-se à ordenação moral do comércio defendida por Aquino, afirma-se que, como efeito inverso de estancar a interpretação, a Suma teológica tanto motivou a alimentação do imaginário cristão em narrativas como A divina comédia, de Dante Alighieri, de modo a ampliar a reflexão sobre as categorias dos pecadores pelo dinheiro, como também forneceu subsídios para a construção de antimodelos em parte das narrativas emolduradas da obra Contos da Cantuária, de Geoffrey Chaucer, recheada de tipos avarentos, simoníacos e fraudadores. Este artigo objetiva apresentar as instruções de Aquino a respeito dos usos do dinheiro, cotejando, em alguns momentos, com textos literários. Para isso, passagens bíblicas, comentadores da Bíblia de tradição católica e textos de economistas são trazidos à medida que o texto da Suma teológica é analisado. Teóricos do pensamento cristão, como Agostinho e Boécio, e do pensamento econômico, como Molina e Robbins, são utilizados.

Recent German Research on Good and Bad Deaths in Medieval Narrative Sources

Abstract This research report presents recent German scholarship on good and bad deaths in medieval narrative sources to an English-speaking audience. Current publications are thus concisely illustrated in their design and with their results.

Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives

Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives

Blacks in the Middle Ages – What About Race and Racism in the Past? Literary and Art-Historical Reflections

Undoubtedly, racism is a deeply-anchored problem that continues to vex our world. There is a long history behind it, which can easily be traced back to the Middle Ages and beyond. This article, however, takes into consideration a number of medieval narratives and art works in which surprisingly positive images of Blacks are provided. The encounter with black-skinned people tended to create problems even for the best-intended white intellectuals or poets during the pre-modern era, but the examples studied here reveal that long before the modern age there was already an alternative discourse to embrace at least individual Blacks as equals within the courtly and the religious context. Since Europe did not yet know the large-scale form of slavery, as it emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were much less contacts between Blacks and Whites. Nevertheless, the evidence brought to the table here clearly signals that we would commit a serious mistake by equating modern-day racism with the situation in the Middle Ages, as much as modern research (Heng) has argued along those lines. It would be more appropriate to talk about the encounter of races within the literary and art-historical context. Even the notion of Black diaspora would not fully address the issue because the evidence brought to the table here engages mostly with black or half-black knights and other individuals who enjoy considerable respect and appear to be integral members of courtly society both in the East and in the West. Instead of working with theoretical models developed for the analysis of racism in our own times, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study offers close readings of literary examples of personal encounters between members of different races in medieval German and Dutch literature, and of the representation of Blacks in late medieval and early modern art history, concluding with some comments on the first Black philosopher in eighteenth-century Germany.

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the 'Other' and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources ed. by Andrzej Pleszczyński and Grischa Vercamer (review)

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the 'Other' and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources ed. by Andrzej Pleszczyński and Grischa Vercamer (review)

The Past Is Evolutionary, the Future Is Byzantine: Kurt Weitzmann’s Contribution to the Research on Pictorial Narration

In the Illustrations in Roll and Codex (1947), Kurt Weitzmann developed a methodological apparatus for studying Byzantine and medieval narrative book illumination. His approach had two important features: an evolutionary narrative typology that paid attention to the narrative strategies the painter chose for presenting a story and a comparative narrative analysis that observed stories in illustrations in relation to their textual source. The focus of this paper is the personal and institutional background of this method, its context, dissemination, and legacy. Weitzmann advanced the study of pictorial storytelling through his pedagogical work and introduced it into the academic curriculum. Alongside stylistic analysis and iconography, it soon became an essential methodological tool in art history that constituted a link between the art of the Byzantine East and the Latin West. This approach also had a key influence on the style of his autobiographical writings. Weitzmann propagated the study of visual narratives through his extremely productive oeuvre and effective personal influence. In the dissemination of Weitzmann’s ideas, three institutions played a key role: Princeton University, Dumbarton Oaks, and the University of Chicago. Weitzmann’s circle made Byzantine studies the leading field for research into visual narratives over the period from around 1940 to 1980.

The Fleece of the Ram

Abstract The fairy tale tradition of Cinderella in folklore (ATU 510) and the medieval Breton fabliau of a magic chastity-testing cloak, known as Le Mantel mautaillié (The Ill-fitting Cloak), and its various analogues, do not seem to have much in common at first. However, both the tale type and the medieval narrative contain an intriguing episode about an item of clothing – a delicate slipper, or a magic cloak – which perfectly fits only one particular woman. This article will show that Icelandic medieval literature and modern fairy tales sharing the image of a colourful fleeced ram are at the crossroads of Cinderella and the mantle tradition, and will help bring them into mutual illumination.

Sarah Wood. Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition

Sarah Wood’s new monograph takes as its focus several distinctive patterns of scribal behaviour in the early transmission of the A, B, and C versions of Piers Plowman: (1) deliberate textual alterations and continuations added to their exemplars, (2) distinctive patterns of marginal annotation and illustration, and (3) efforts to incorporate the poem into larger, miscellaneous volumes containing three specific subgenres of medieval narrative. All of these scribal choices, she maintains, ‘offer fascinating, if ambiguous, insight into the sometimes unexpected ways the poet’s earliest audience understood his work’ (p. 1). Since most modern studies of the Piers manuscripts have focused instead on a fairly small number of reliable early copies necessary for establishing authorial readings in the poem’s recognized versions, Wood hopes to rectify some of the negligence suffered by the other primary witnesses, which ‘languish virtually unknown to most readers except as sigla in editions’ (p. 2). One of Wood’s central claims is that the layout choices and marginal annotations of relatively obscure Piers manuscripts sometimes reveal early scribes and consumers of Piers Plowman bringing very different expectations to their reading experience of the poem than we typically do today. Many early readers seem to have believed that Piers Plowman would tell a ‘story’ and that it would deliver a coherent account of a ‘life’, either that of Will or that of Piers (p. 5). This often meant an expectation, on their part, of some kind of spiritual autobiography. By contrast, recent academic studies of Piers sometimes tend to look past the narrator completely, as a mere enabling device, and focus much more attention on the poem’s reflections of late-medieval theological disputes than on the narrative details about what purports to be Will’s pilgrimage to Truth.

Performing medieval narrative and song

The bipartite event ‘Imagining French Narrative and Song c.1100–c.1350: Literary, Musicological and Performance Perspectives’ was held in the magnificent setting of St John’s College, University of Cambridge on 14 January 2023. It comprised a conference at the Old Divinity School—an impressive late Victorian edifice built in the Gothic Revival style—and a closing concert in the nearby medieval Round Church, founded in the early 12th century and modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Coincidentally marking the date of the 787th anniversary of the marriage in 1236 between an English king (Henry III) and a French noblewoman (Éléonore de Provence), plus also that of the annual medieval ‘Feast of the Ass’ (celebrating the Flight into Egypt, with its famous Latin and French conductus Orientis partibus referring to an ass ‘from Eastern regions’), there was perhaps no better occasion for ‘imagining’ medieval French romances and songs, both in terms of their international impact and also changing medieval perceptions of them, whether secular or sacred. Attended by around 35 delegates, the conference included 12 papers given by literary scholars and musicologists from universities in the UK, France, Belgium and the USA; this international mix thus set the groundwork for an exciting interchange of ideas between academics from frequently isolated yet closely overlapping disciplines.

La liste d’instruments de musique : un leitmotiv du récit médiéval

La liste d’instruments de musique qui accompagne les scènes de liesse collective est un leitmotiv du récit médiéval. Ces passages soulèvent la question de ce qui distingue le topos narratif d’autres éléments récurrents dans un récit tels que le motif, le cliché ou le topos rhétorique. On verra en effet qu’elles permettent d’aller au-delà du simple ornatus rhétorique pour attirer l’attention sur l’instance narrative responsable de ce déploiement terminologique. Dans les textes considérés dans l’article, la liste d’instruments fait valoir la compétence littéraire et lexicale du narrateur qui s’identifie ainsi à la figure du ménestrel associée à sa performance et à ses instruments.

Rewilding with the cri in Medieval French Texts: Yvain and Mélusine

Abstract Focusing on two medieval narratives about identity transformation, Yvain and Mélusine, this article explores areas of dialogue between medieval literary studies and current perspectives on sound and rewilding the environment. Sound studies have in recent times enabled a more expansive philosophical reflection on the intersections between language, ecology, and identity. This article uses a friction between philosophical perspectives on the French cri and ecological ‘acoustemology’ to illustrate such reflection. If, as contemporary ecologists suggest, rewilding is a process underscored by careful human management in order to restore landscapes back to a state of wilderness, the same can be said of moments of narrative transformation in medieval texts that are revealed through sound. How might such interpretations of texts offer ways of linking textual modes of rewilding to the transformation of human and nonhuman subjects? To conclude, the article suggests how listening to medieval texts, to their narrative pivots and the changes in the sounds they depict, modifies the way nonhuman identity is discussed in connection with medieval (and non-medieval) literature.

Correction to: The Animal Nurse in Late Medieval Narrative and its Relation to Genre

Correction to: The Animal Nurse in Late Medieval Narrative and its Relation to Genre

A.W. Strouse, Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision

A.W. Strouse, Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision

Letters in Late Medieval Franciscan Observant Chronicles: Communication, Narrative, and Reform

The aim of this paper is to discuss the many functions of the letters in several late medieval Franciscan Observant chroniclers. Through a comparative analysis of several chronicles originating from early sixteenth century Observant circles, I illustrate the main uses of letters in historical narratives, from their heavy presence and function as vehicles of information to a quasi-absence thereof. The integration of letters in chronicles contributes to the understanding of ideas of accuracy in a late medieval narrative: while chronicles that embed a smaller number of letters may raise questions about their reliability, those that include or simply mention a substantial number of letters appear to have aimed at providing a more precise account of events. In light of this diversity of usage, a question arises: what motivated certain chroniclers to prioritize the accuracy of information conveyed through letters, and conversely, why did other chroniclers favor a narrative discourse uninterrupted by epistolary documents? In the first part of the paper, I discuss several key features of epistolography in chronicle writing. Then, I move to the main areas in which we see letters at work: network formation, communication, decision making, moral instruction, transmission of knowledge, narrative, and character building. Finally, I examine how chronicles can be used to reveal new features of medieval epistolography.