Medieval Religious Culture Research Articles

Saints who sailed from the sea: «German» model of foolishness in Old Russia

The article attempts to put forward and substantiate a hypothesis about the use of a special model of this feat in the formation of the cult of some holy fools of the Russian Church, borrowed not from the eastern, but from the western medieval religious culture. Some lives of Russian holy fools noticeably fall out of the Eastern Christian tradition, with which old and modern historiography links their hagiography. Despite the veneration of the Byzantine σαλος in Ancient Russia, in its religious life the practices of foolishness occupied a marginal position for a long time. In the process of formation and development of the «national» cult of holy fools in the Muscovite state, one of the options for explaining where such ascetics came from was their foreign origin. In the article this problem is considered on the material of the hagiography of Isidor of Rostov and Procopius of Ustyug. In their Lives, one can single out a topic that is common to them and unusual for Russian hagiography. Both saints are repeatedly referred to in the texts of their Lives as foreigners who previously lived in Western countries, «German land». Both found in the Orthodox faith their «spiritual fatherland» and abandoned the «Latinism». In the Lives of each of them, «foolishness» is explicated as the main religious practice. But this is not the «obscenity» of the Eastern Christian σαλος, but a desire for solitude and wandering close to the model of behavior of the saints of the Western Middle Ages. In both lives there is a motif of the sea. Based on the observations and arguments presented in the article, it can be assumed that the compilers of the hagiographies, creating the image of a holy fool-foreigner unknown to Old Russian literature before, were guided by hagiographic texts not only of Greek-Byzantine, but also of Western European origin, some of which were available in Slavic translations. The saturation of the texts with Novgorod plot details indicates that Novgorod, which had long-standing and extensive cultural ties both with the post-Byzantine world and with the countries of the Baltic region, could be the place for constructing this new model of holiness for Old Russia.

Editors’ Introduction

We are delighted to present this special issue of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.Instead of the usual set of scholarly articles, this issue brings together new editions and translations of primary texts with new research guides, ranging from well- to little-known figures from the medieval religious world. First, Ana Rita Parreiras Reis offers an edition of the heretofore unedited Treatise Against Fleshly Affections, an anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English text found in London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C xviii, which may have originated at Syon Abbey. Second, Andrew Fogleman translates Jean Gerson’s Sermon on Angels, a text that reveals some of the origins of Gerson’s later (and better-known) thought on the discernment of spirits. Next, Clarck Drieshen’s article explores manuscript evidence that suggests that a visionary text from Hampole Priory may in fact be an English adaptation of Continental sources, rather than an original production of the Priory, and suggests new areas of comparative material research in medieval women’s visionary texts. Finally, Andrew Halpin and Claudio Peri provide an extensive bibliographic survey on Jacopone da Todi, highlighting the importance of international scholarship to a fuller understanding of his poetry.While each piece collected here is concerned with distinct texts and is not inherently related to the others, all suggest exciting new opportunities for research into later medieval Christianity, in particular on areas that have long been the subject of study: Syon Abbey, discretio spirituum, the presumably English origins of the Hampole revelation, and Jacopone da Todi’s mystical verses. Reis speculates that the Treatise may have been affiliated with Syon Abbey, which would offer new insights into that community; Fogleman’s translation illuminates Gerson’s well-known thoughts on the validity of visionary experience; Drieshen challenges received assumptions regarding the source of a visionary text; and Halpin and Peri argue for the inclusion of both European and Anglophone scholarship in the study of a well-known Italian mystic. Alongside these new editions, translations, and approaches, we are pleased to present our inaugural special review essay: in “Denying Sameness, Making Race: Medieval Anti-Judaism,” Samantha Katz Seal surveys several new books focused on different aspects of medieval Judaism, illuminating emerging work in an important area of medieval religious culture. Additional book reviews survey new theoretical approaches, new interdisciplinary readings of visual culture, and new work on religious literatures and cultures from Ireland to Iceland. With this special issue dedicated to new bibliographic, editorial, methodological, and translation work, we aim to expand the JMRC’s offerings to medieval studies, making room for considerations of method alongside new scholarship, and inspire new approaches to all areas of medieval religious cultures.

БІБЛІЙНІ ОБРАЗИ І ЖІНОЧЕ СЛУЖІННЯ У ХРИСТИЯНСЬКІЙ ЦЕРКВІ

The article analyzes the medieval interpretations of biblical images of Sophia of the Wisdom of God, Eve, Virgin Mary. Their role of women's inclusion in the social order of the Western European Medieval Society in the religious-cultural model is considered. The activity of women in religion, politics and science has been steadily increasing, but the society, at least in modern times, continues to broadcast ideas about the woman which are most clear and in detailed in the religious and cultural heritage of Christianity. They all relate to those ideas that contend with the idea of a woman's low capacity for intellectual activity, unprofessionalism, immaturity, and passivity, which are conditioned by "feminine nature". If, in the context of medieval religious culture, such perception was related to relevant socially predetermined functions that were actively promoted by the Christian church and supported by the specific religious space of that era, then women's ministry in the Christian church, based on women's biblical images, exemplifies the strengthening and propagation of the Christian faith.

Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

<i>Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's</i> Piers Plowman <i>and the End of Constantinian Christianity</i>

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo

Reviewed by: Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo Ellen K. Rentz Robyn Malo. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. vii, 298. $70.00 cloth. In this fabulous new book, Robyn Malo challenges many of our most enduring assumptions about the meaning, function, and significance of relics in late medieval religious culture and literary history. In particular, she questions scholars’ conviction that “relics signified in a way that did not necessarily need explanation,” that a relic’s meaning is “always already there” (12). Malo warns us that, when it comes to relics, we have a tendency to “idealize” rather than “interrogate” (13). We haven’t thought deeply enough about relics, reliquaries, or the narratives that surrounded them, and Malo encourages us to question their seeming stability and straightforwardness. Malo asks how relics came to signify, and argues that narrative played a much more constructive and productive role in the enterprise than we’ve tended to give it credit for. Relics and reliquaries are anything but simple or easy to construe: they pose what Malo calls an “interpretive problem” (6), and an outpouring of relic-oriented narratives between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries bears witness to this. Relics and reliquaries needed narrative in order to be understood; their meaning inhered in—in some instances, only inhered in—language. Malo’s fascinating exploration of the rich and complex relationship between relic and narrative teaches us as much about the literary as it does about the material. Language could open up meaning, but it could also conceal it, and as Malo demonstrates, the same was true for material enshrinement: although we tend to associate reliquaries with display, they also trafficked in “occlusion.” Throughout, [End Page 346] Malo complicates our expectation that relics and reliquaries facilitate closeness and familiarity with the divine, that they render the divine familiar. The book studies saint cults in the broader context of late medieval devotional culture, offering new perspectives on lay piety, religious materiality, and the relationship between text and image. It also locates relic discourse in literary history, bringing religious practice to bear on a wide range of texts in new and unexpected ways, and raising important questions about genre, form, and the status of language and representation. A model of interdisciplinary study, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England makes important contributions to a wide range of fields. The book’s five chapters are organized in two main parts. In the first (“Relic Discourse and the Cult of Saints”), Malo explores the development and commonplaces of “relic discourse,” while the second (“The Trouble with Relic Discourse”) concerns the deployment of relic discourse in a variety of literary contexts, including English Grail legends, Chaucerian poetry, and Wycliffite writings. Throughout, Malo’s thematic organization of the book makes for creative and productive new readings of a wide variety of texts and objects. Chapter 1 focuses on the conventions of relic discourse, particularly the function of specialized technical terminology and metaphor. Malo explores the essential role that language played in producing a relic’s meaning at a time when encounters with relics were increasingly characterized by deferral, distance, and occlusion: “Writing filled the gap,” Malo argues, because it assigned value and meaning not only to relics, but to the reliquaries that housed them (31). In doing so, it also drew attention to the potentially vexed relationship between the container and its contents. The chapter pairs readings of a wide variety of texts (relic lists, saints’ lives, pilgrimage texts) with fascinating discussion of late medieval developments in shrine base construction. Malo handles this impressive range of literary, historical, and material evidence with tremendous skill. In Chapter 2, she explores the “commonplaces” of relic discourse and the extent to which they gave meaning to a relic—establishing a saint’s praesentia, of course, but also complicating the relationship between relic and reliquary. The convention of nighttime exhumation and translation, for example, emphasizes “the parallels between translation, darkness, and relic discourse,” presenting the relic encounter as “an occluded, secret—even dark—affair,” and one that requires narrative: in a wide variety of saints’ lives, “language supplies meaning for what remains unseen...

FIONA SOMERSET. Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif

FIONA SOMERSET. Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif

Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Third Orders, Rules, and Canonical Legitimacy

In the early thirteenth century, informal communities of pious lay women in urban areas of Northern Europe came to the attention of the Church. These women lived in their own homes or small communities, and played a prominent role in secular society. However, these women soon found themselves both the subject of controversy, and increasingly steered toward a monastic model. Attempts were made to create and institutionalize a “middling” status. These primarily took the form of the creation of “third orders” or “tertiary groups” attached to official religious orders. Using the example of the so-called Franciscan third order, this article explores the evolution and institutionalization of penitential life from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It both traces the evolution of the fictive Franciscan penitential order, and places it in its wider context. In so doing, it explores the norms and controversies associated with this way of life in later medieval and early modern religious culture.

Richard Guldeford's Pilgrimage: Piety and Cultural Change in Late Fifteenth‐ and Early Sixteenth‐Century England

AbstractThe account of Sir Richard Guldeford's pilgrimage, printed in 1511, is just one of over 500 surviving medieval accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage. In many ways conventional, it nonetheless bears a number of distinctive features. Its presentation of first‐person detailed eyewitness testimony in conjunction with judicious use of source material, innovative treatment of travel balanced with sober and restrained piety, and eschewal of some of the more fabulous aspects of pilgrimage literature, all make it an important example of the vogue for sober piety in late fifteenth‐ and early sixteenth‐century England. It provides evidence of critical engagement with debates surrounding pilgrimage and related aspects of religious practice such as indulgences and the cult of relics, and it is an important example of new approaches to the writing and publishing of the literature of pilgrimage and travel. Richard Guldeford, royal courtier and civil servant, did not write the account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but it emanated from the Guldeford family's interests in fashionable humanist learning and reformist religious sensibilities. The text's innovations and tensions are representative of wider shifts and deeper fault‐lines in late medieval religious culture prior to the enormous religious changes of the Reformation, and are further evidence of the ways in which pre‐Reformation orthodox religious culture was neither homogeneous nor unchanging. Above all, it offered a reformed and rehabilitated practice of the Jerusalem pilgrimage at a time when pilgrimage was increasingly vulnerable to attacks from both orthodox and heterodox critics.

The Consumption of the Sacred: Popular Piety in a Late Medieval Hungarian Town

This paper interprets late medieval religious culture by considering lay expectations of and attitudes towards the clergy. The analysis is prompted by and framed around a convent controversy, which was extensively documented in the course of an ecclesiastical trial. Contemporary ‘convent reform’ is not conceived as an ecclesiastical event, but rather as a symptom of the changing relationship between town and convent. The description of religious provision in the town shows that there was a strong lay demand for the clergy and the rituals performed by them, and that parishioners were ready to invest financially in maintaining local priests, even if it involved considerable additional expenses. The conflict between town and convent can therefore be considered as a result of a liturgical deficit in the spiritual market of the town. The parishioners' behaviour is interpreted as a symptom of the eucharistic and penitential devotional culture of the time, which was regulated in practice by the principle of intercession and the institution of good works. The paper argues that the divergent strands of late medieval religious culture generated a ‘consumption’ of the sacred. The mendicant friars had a special role in the late medieval religious market as they provided opportunities for religious experiences which differed in kind from parish observances.

Mountain Last Judgment and Rural Apocalypse: Patterns of Imagery

John-Paul Himka, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians. 368 pp., illus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0802098092. $75.00. Gleb Markelov and Arina Bil'diug, eds., Litsevye apokalipsisy Russkogo Severa: Rukopisi XVII-XIX vv. iz fondov Drevlekhranilishcha Pushkinskogo doma (Illuminated Apocalypses of the Russian North: 17th- to 19th-Century Manuscripts from the Pushkin House Archives). 172 pp., illus. St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Pushkinskogo doma, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5877810051. Both books reviewed here deal with regions that may be described as peripheries of the Orthodox world. In the late Middle Ages and early modern times, the Carpathian Mountains and the nearby foothills sheltered small monastic communities that were never important cultural centers, and their libraries were at most modest. Wooden churches in highland Rusyn villages did not boast of frescoes similar to those painted in the stone churches of Muscovy, Moldavia, and the Balkans. In peasant, mainly Old Believer, communities in the Russian North, the medieval traditions and religious imagery remained preserved for two centuries after the painful ruptures of the religious schism and reforms of Peter the Great. Both in the Russian North and the Carpathians, everyday religious experience, hopes, and, even more so, fears were imbued with eschatological imagery that is not always easy to decipher. The Last Judgment icons and the illuminated Apocalypses shaped and at the same time reflected the beliefs and the changing worldview of these communities and serve as one of the keys to a better understanding of medieval religious culture, including both political theology and popular demonology. Yet Eastern Orthodox eschatological imagery remains for historians largely unexplored territory, if not a terra incagnita. The principal Byzantine and Old Russian apocrypha, treaties, and homilies about the end of the world or the struggle between angels and demons were published as late as the 19th century. Still, the historical and cultural importance of the visual material contained in these complex sources is generally underestimated by scholars. In the last two years the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St. Petersburg and the University of Toronto Press have brought us two books that throw light on the eschatological imagery of the Carpathian region in the 15th-16th centuries and the Russian North from the 18th to the end of the 19th centuries. Although these books have almost nothing in common in terms of their analytical objectives and ambitions, both nonetheless provide valuable insights for analyzing the relations between ecclesiastical teaching and popular religion. Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians, by John-Paul Himka of the University of Alberta, is more than a highly specialized iconographic study. The author not only explores the Last Judgment imagery in the Carpathian region, tracing the paths and mechanisms of its development, but tries to answer a broader question: is it possible to speak about a specifically Ukrainian sacred art in the early modern period? Illuminated Apocalypses of the Russian North, by the Russian scholars Gleb Markelov and Arina Bil'diug, is not a scholarly study in the proper sense of the term but rather an album, accompanied by an essay that presents the modern reader with the tradition of manuscript Apocalypses written, painted, mediated, and transmitted from generation to generation by the Old Believers. The Carpathian tradition of Last Judgment iconography originated in the 15th century in the large region that includes present-day western Ukraine, southeastern Poland, and eastern Slovakia. The area was inhabited by Rusyns/Ukrainians, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians. What is special about the Carpathians is that it has always been a border region, open to multiple cultural and religious influences from Moldavia, the Balkans, Poland, remote Rus' principalities, and eventually Muscovy. …

Medical Magic and the Church in Thirteenth-Century England.

Medical Magic and the Church in Thirteenth-Century England.

Editors’ Introduction: Vernacular Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Literature

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In March of 2008, the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder, hosted a small interdisciplinary conference titled Illustrating the Dharma: Popular in Medieval Japanese Fiction. The conference featured ten presentations and one keynote speech devoted to exploring aspects of (as opposed to monastic, elite, or orthodox doctrinal) in the illustrated fiction of the Kamakura, Muromachi, and early Edo periods.roughly the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. Participants considered a variety of hand-illustrated and woodblockprinted texts from an array of methodological perspectives.literary, historical, Buddhological, and art historical.concentrating in particular on issues of religious doctrine, practice, and representation in the literary genres of setsuwa ... (tales), otogizoshi ... (Muromachi-period fiction), ko-joruri ... (early puppet theater), jisha engi ... (temple and shrine histories), and kowakamai ... (ballad-dramas). The present thematic issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies is an indirect result of that 2008 conference. Five of the seven essays included here were first presented at the Boulder event, which also inspired our underlying (and, it was intended, unifying) approach: to consider premodern Japanese religious culture through the lens of literature, rather than more traditional Buddhist scriptural, historical, biographical, and exegetical sources. Our two corollary desiderata have been, from the start, to explore the roles of Buddhist sectarian and/or didactic concerns in the production of late-Heian and medieval literature, and to consider the place and significance of visuality in the illustrated textual media of medieval and early-Edo Japan (including illuminated sutras, emaki ... picture scrolls, nara ehon ... picture books, and woodblock-printed books and maps).1 The seven contributors to this volume have approached these issues in different ways, but each engages the three topics of Buddhism, literature, and visual representation. Terminological Considerations: Popular Buddhism, Folk Buddhism, Vernacular Medieval religious culture in Japan was fundamentally trans-sectarian, constituting a rich amalgam of diverse and occasionally incompatible elements, rather than an organized or internally consistent universe of practice and belief. Specialized cults dedicated to particular deities, bodhisattvas, and celebrity icons flourished in the cities and surrounding communities, dominating the religious landscape and competing for a limited pool of potential devotees. Itinerant preacher-entertainers plied the roadways, frightening audiences with stories and images of hell, extolling the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas, and collecting temple donations. Insofar as many works of medieval Japanese fiction are understood to derive from the proselytizing and fund-raising activities of these street-level preacher-entertainers, including biwa hoshi ... (biwa-playing priests), etoki hoshi ... (picture-explaining priests), Kumano bikuni ... (nuns of Kumano), kanjin hijiri ... (fund-raising priests), Koya hijiri ... (priests of Mt. Koya), shomonji ... (low-caste chanters), miko ... (female mediums), and the like, their study promises insights into medieval religious culture in a way that the study of sutras, commentaries, and learned treatises does not. At least, such was the idea that inspired the Boulder conference. The reader will notice, however, that what was popular Buddhism in the conference title has become vernacular Buddhism here. In the course of working on this special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, we the editors came to feel that the former term did not accurately reflect the diversity of the works discussed in the articles. After all, a number of the texts treated by our authors originated in the highest circles of ecclesiastical authority, rather than in the world of street preaching. …

Cooperative Piety among Monastic and Secular Women in Late Medieval Germany

AbstractScholarship has demonstrated that religious life for women was more fluid, more tied to the secular world and to gender ideologies, than strict categorizations of monastic versus lay, regular versus extraregular, visual versus intellectual allows. This article argues for the conceptualization and study of female monasticism, and female spirituality in general, as part of a broad continuum—as part of a shared culture of devotional practices—accepted and embraced (to a greater or lesser extent) by both men and women, secular and lay. More specifically, it explores the interaction between secular and professed women in support of monastic life, monastic devotion, and more broadly, medieval religious culture. Religious and lay women collaborated and cooperated to support specific religious communities and particular devotional practices, like the nuns' performance of the liturgy or their duty to remember patrons as part of the monastic memoria. Such collaboration and cooperation, however, has often escaped the notice of historians.

Die 'Neue Frommigkeit' in Europa im Spatmittelalter

The articles in this volume—one of the last published by the recently abolished Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen—offer a summary of the work on late medieval religious culture in different European regions: Poland, Bohemia, Southern Germany and Italy. They also present a welcome starting point, suggesting methods and approaches for renewed research into the diffusion of spiritual ideals. The subject is introduced by Kaspar Elm, who reminds his audience that the new devotion has been seen as a precursor of the Reformation, or the breeding ground for it, and also as a sectarian and peripheral movement. He describes the phenomenon of a devout lay initiative which generated its own spiritual support structure in the form of the congregation of Windesheim. Thomas Kock asks how the rapid development of the new piety was managed, chosing the priory of Böddeken near Paderborn as his example. He demonstrates that reform was associated with economic recovery and reconstruction but he also draws attention to the excesses of the movement, among which corporal punishments and apparently also self-mutilation featured. The protocol of a visitation by Johannes Busch of 1469 is given as appendix.

“Folklore” and “popular religion” in Britain during the middle ages

This article explores whether the bi‐polar model of “elite” and “folk” or “popular religion” can be maintained for the medieval period. In fact, there were many strands to medieval religious culture, and people from a variety of backgrounds participated at a variety of levels on different occasions. Using a variety of chronicles and other sources, rather than the more dogmatic penitentials and canon law texts usually cited, this article argues that historians should make room for “local religious culture” in their taxonomies, in which both elites (including clerics) and people could participate.

Ana Ozores's Nerves

In first days of May of 1897, after returning from a trip to Nuremberg, Freud sent four letters with extensive notes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. In these notes, entitled The Architecture of Hysteria, Freud laid out what he, drawing on architectural metaphor, called the structure of He likened projected fantasies to defensive structures (Schutzbauten) and outworks (Vorbauten) that prevent access to memories of primal scenes. Impressed by Nuremberg's medieval architecture, Freud drawing a parallel between city's fortifications and hysterical symptoms. In second installment of notes, which Freud mailed to Fliess on May 25, he added a diagram of disease that looks like a sketch of Nuremberg towers (Architecture 203).Aside from spatialization of hysteria implied in notion of structure, what I find most interesting in Freud's recourse to architecture is temporal background of metaphor. His inspiration in an architecture as densely historical as that of Nuremberg is well suited to a definition of hysteria that seeks to account for layers of experience concealed by symptoms.Nuremberg's architecture, explains William McGrath, translates into form contest between city's ruling lord, Burggraf, and middle class. In 1377 citizenry erected a tower on eastern wall to spy on activities in Burggraf's fortress. Later, descendants of responded in kind, and in fifteenth century his fortress was equipped with a peaked roof and wooden balconies which allowed his men to keep watch on city while city's men on their lookout were watching Burggraf (McGrath 192-94). In Freud's diagram, those peaked roofs represent hysterical fantasy, an apparently static structure arising out of a dynamic power struggle.The reader will have guessed that I am about to relate this bit of Freudian lore to famous description of Cathedral tower in opening scene of La Regenta. I am not advancing a Freudian reading of this great novel, nor am I about to restate, for umpteenth time, pseudo-Freudian wisdom that Vetusta's tower is a phallic symbol, among other reasons because symbols gather their significance from their contexts. And it is far from clear that Clarin's description of Vetusta's municipal geography transcribes Magistral's repressed sexual desire.Freud's recourse to towers of Nuremberg to theorize a psychic malady that taxing doctors' ingenuity in last decades of nineteenth century is useful for other reasons. One of these reasons is that his architectural metaphor refers psychic conflict to a historical clash that appears congealed in architectural form. It is no coincidence that Freud inspired by medieval architecture. As a Jewish scientist living in an increasingly anti-Semitic Vienna, he shared Jean-Martin Charcot's view that medieval religious culture cause of widespread hysterical manifestations (McGrath 196). So, despite Charcot's oft-quoted c'est toujours la chose genitale, a phrase often cited in ignorance that it reported by Freud (History 48), young Freud introduced a dimension of social struggle in his description of psychic mechanism of hysteria. This dimension identified social struggle with power of vision. To see, to penetrate alien secrets is to master owners of those secrets. To resist, to obstruct searching gaze, to retreat from scrutiny and to camouflage behind symptoms is strength out of weakness deployed in hysteria, an elusive or, as English doctor Thomas Sydenham had called it (qtd. in Janet 18), a Proteus, an ever-changing disease.From its inception, La Regenta focuses on this type of conflict. Like Nuremberg's towers in Freud's diagram, Vetusta's tower is both a symptom of a hidden morbidity and place from which secrets are intruded upon. Up there, Magistral sees himself as el amo espiritual de la provincia (I: 462). …

:The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages

Best known during the Middle Ages as the prostitute who became a faithful follower of Christ, Mary Magdalen was the most beloved female saint after the Virgin Mary. Why the Magdalen became so popular, what meanings she conveyed, and how her story evolved over the centuries are the focus of this compelling exploration of late medieval religious culture. Analyzing previously unpublished sermons, Katherine Jansen uses the lens of medieval preaching to examine the mendicant friars' transformation of Mary Magdalen, a shadowy gospel figure, into an emblem of action and contemplation, a symbol of vanity and lust, a model of perfect penance, and the embodiment of hope and salvation. She draws on diverse historical sources to reveal the laity's devotion to Mary Magdalen, which departed significantly from the friars' image of the saint, signaling a major development in popular religious practice and personal piety. Finally, the author comprehensively addresses the question of the House of Anjou's alliance with the Magdalen, and illuminates the relationship between politics and sanctity in southern France and Italy.Jansen shows how perceptions of the Magdalen merged with errors and misunderstandings to shape the social, spiritual, and political agendas of the later Middle Ages. She brings to life the rich complexity of medieval culture, which condemned female sexuality and women's preaching and yet popularized the veneration of Mary Magdalen as a former prostitute chosen by Christ to be the apostle of the apostles, the first to witness and preach the Good News of the Resurrection.

'THE BALLAD OF ST STEPHEN AND HEROD': BIBLICAL HISTORY AND MEDIEVAL POPULAR RELIGIOUS CULTURE

One immediate problem concerning medieval popular religious culture is how to define it. There has been extensive discussion of popular medieval religious culture; and to paraphrase Douglas Gray, most medievalists who are concerned with it are rather like the Supreme Court justice who remarked (concerning pornography), 'Of course I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.'1 I share Gray's sense that it is much easier to distinguish between popular and 'learned' medieval religious culture on a case-by-case basis, intuitively, than it is to formulate clear and appropriate definitions. The late medieval ballad 'St Stephen and Herod' may, however, serve as a kind of test case because it exemplifies certain aspects of 'popular' medieval Christianity very clearly. The object of this paper is thus twofold. On the one hand, it will attempt to answer the puzzlement of the first editor of the ballad, Thomas Wright, who remarked, 'I know not whence this strange legend of St Steven being King Herod's clerk of the kitchen is derived.'2 At the same time, I wish to suggest that this ballad clearly displays the tendency of medieval popular religion to reshape 'historical' narrative to conform to the conventions and expectations of traditional or 'folk' narrative.3 Obviously any attempt to define or even move towards a definition of a broadly based cultural phenomenon on the basis of one brief poem may seem arbitrary, yet the poem can serve as a strikingly clear example of differing concerns in conflict-- the 'folk' sensibility of medieval popular religious culture reshaping the 'facts' of scriptural history, a mode of history which may be defined for present purposes as a narrative of past events which can be supported from scriptural texts. Since 'St Stephen and Herod' is brief and since it is not widely known, I give a text of the ballad as a convenience to the reader:4 This is a remarkable and interesting narrative, and it is radically unhistorical in two quite different ways. The modern reader might immediately be struck by the fabulous nature of the miracle that provokes Herod to martyr Stephen, but the narrative violates history in a simpler and less debatable way. Stephen proto-martyr was a deacon early in the apostolic age of the Church; he preached the faith to a hostile audience of Jews (including Paul before his conversion) and he was martyred by stoning immediately afterwards. His history, indeed, all that is known about him, is prominently recorded in Acts vi.5-vii.59.5 It therefore follows that he was alive after the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus. The emphasis in the ballad on the association of Stephen and Herod, and the claim that Stephen's martyrdom was the result of the manifestation of the star at Christ's birth, are radically at odds with biblical chronology. The biblical figure was a witness for the faith in the early years of the Church: the hero of the ballad narrative was martyred while Jesus was still an infant. Medieval religious writers might expect their audience to accept the truth of extra-scriptural miracles concerning some New Testament figure - indeed the New Testament itself provides some sanction for such claims6 - but this narrative flatly contradicts Scripture. At least one medieval author was aware of this specific problem concerning the legend of Stephen and Herod; the anonymous author of the northern Middle English verse account of Stephen's martyrdom 'De Sancto Stephano protomartire' comments: In addition to its intrinsic interest as a medieval comment on the Stephen narrative preserved in the ballad, this text also offers evidence (hitherto unnoticed as far as I am aware) for the possible currency of the English version of the Stephen ballad itself, which is only preserved in one mid-- fifteenth-century manuscript. The comment shows that the core narrative of the Stephen ballad and possibly some version of the ballad itself was current among 'laude ['lewd', i. …

Reader, Teller, and Teacher: The Narrator of Robert Henryson’s Moral Fables by Rosemary Greentree

REVIEWS of Margaret, Alexis, Eustace, Catherine, and Juliana), and familiarity with these sources might well have enabled Gehrke to say something more meaningful about the versions of the same legends in her manuscripts. Gehrke's knowledge of medieval Christianity also seems inadequate at some points-as, for example, when she equates the miraculous with "magical power" and sets it against an ethical understanding of the faith (e.g., p. 28) or when she suggests that stories about holy hermits invited believers to reject the sacraments and clergy ofthe "official" church (p. 99). Despite its weaknesses Gehrke's book should be of interest to many students of medieval religious literature. It will of course be indispensable for anyone working with these particular manuscripts. In addition, it gives detailed and useful information on a number of vernacular religious works in Old French, most notably collections of miracles ofthe Virgin and tales from the Vie des Peres. It encourages further attention to such works, and to their reception history in particular, by demonstrating the heterogeneity of the manuscript traditions and the degree to which they were shaped by scribal choice. Nor is the value of this book confined to the kinds of groundwork it lays for other scholars to build on. In the most successful chapter, entitled "Saint Francis and the Mother of God: An Ascetic Ideal for the Laity," Gehrke constructs a fine interpretation of MS Bibliotheque Nationale franfaise 2094, showing how illuminating the close analysis of a manuscript can be when it is combined with an adequately complex and nuanced model of medieval religious culture. The book has neither an index nor a list ofthe abbreviations used. More seriously, it fails to translate the many passages it quotes from the manu­ scripts, making parts of its argument inaccessible to readers who do not know Old French. SHERRY L. REAMES University of Wisconsin, Madison ROSEMARY GREENTREE. Reader, Teller, and Teacher: The Narrator ofRobert Henryson's Moral Fables. Publications of the Scottish Studies Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz in Germersheim, vol. 15. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Pp. ix, 120. $27.95. The contents of this study, originally the author's Master's thesis, are indi­ cated by the title. The volume consists of nine brief chapters, each dealing 207 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER with some aspect of Henryson's narrative persona, an appendix on the order of the fables (the Bassandyne order is approved), and a bibliography, appar­ ently of works consulted, since several entries are not cited in the text or the notes. There is no index. Greentree summarizes her argument at the outset: "As reader and teller, the Narrator serves as the window through which the audience may gain an experience of the fanciful world of the tales. . . . As a teacher, he demonstrates and juggles with the truth, and arranges the moral lessons which he gives to erring man" (p. 1). This central thesis is an attractive one, especially sihce Henryson has tradition­ ally been thought to have been a schoolmaster, and beast fables were a standard element of the medieval curriculum. By reinterpreting Aesop's Fables, however, Henryson also becomes a critic, a role which is similar, but not identical, to his role as teacher. As both teller and critic, Henryson's narrator combines the roles of the pilgrim Chaucer and Harry Bailly of The Canterbury Tales, and a comparison with Chaucer would have been instruc­ tive. In any case, the various chapters consider such topics as the narrator's style, the narrator's world, the moralitates of the Fables, and "the wolfs progress." I found the last of these particularly well done, and many local felicities are scattered throughout. For example, Greentree notes that only the first fable, "The Cock and theJasp," has a lesson which is limited to the moralitas and of which the protagonist is ignorant. Thus the moral is di­ rected specifically at the audience, and the absence of an obvious correlation between fable and moral forces that audience to be dependent upon the narrator for moral instruction, thus establishing the narrator's role as teacher (pp. 10-15). Similarly, the chapter on the wolf(pp. 53--63) distin­ guishes...

Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy by David Wallace

REVIEWS terdependence of popular devotion and official promotion in e�en the most highly politicized canonization processes. By the fifteenth century a majority of modern saints venerated in even the larger urban centres of Europe by the most well established religious orders had not been canonized, so expensive and unpromising had the process become. Al­ though Vauchez interprets this as a failure on the Church's part to recon­ cile the official, the local, and the popular, even these local cults could only work ifthe laity as well as the bishop and his minions wanted them to work. Further research on individual local cults by scholars such as Aviad Kleinberg has somewhat complicated this picture, and its overly generalized definition of the "popular." However, like Eamon Duffy's work on late-medieval English devotion, Vauchez's study stands as a challenge to the binaries that literary scholars (including myself) have sometimes assumed in analyzing medieval religious culture, and makes provocative reading for this reason alone. NICHOLAS WATSON University of Western Ontario DAVID WALLACE. Chaztcerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture se­ ries. Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xix, 555. $55.00. At the turn ofthe present decade, a number ofinfluential Chaucer stud­ ies, appearing in quick succession, wrought important changes in the way Americans, at least, understand and teach the poet. Carolyn Din­ shaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetic (1989), Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer (1989), H. Marshall Leicester Jr.'s The Disenchanted Self (1990), and Lee Pat­ terson's Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory (1991) brought gender and psy­ choanalytic theory, deconstruction, and Ricardian social, political, eco­ nomic, and institutional history to bear on the Chaucerian corpus in deeply enlightening (and to some, deeply unsettling) ways. David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity now takes its place in this elite group ofChaucerian blockbusters. Its major contribution is to contextu­ alize Chaucer doubly as a political poet: more immediately in the con­ text ofRicardian England, but (and this is Wallace's special claim to our 397 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER attention and gratitude) more broadly within the orbit ofthe politics of trecento northern Italy, and thus of the Italian humanism (not just the poetic production) of Petrarch and Boccaccio, which reflects the con­ frontations and crises at the center of trecento political theory and practice. Wallace starts from the major political fact oftrecento Italian politics: the struggle for mastery of northern Italy between Florence and Milan, a struggle with profound implications for the subsequent history of western Europe."Florence typically celebrated its own sense ofrepubli­ can libertas by developing ...an associational ideology, suggesting that all inhabitants of the city-state share equal footing on a lateral plane. " By contrast, for "northern Italian despotisms ofthe late Trecento[,} [t}he chiefideological vector ...is vertical, one-way, and downward descend­ ing," and "generates ideological forms that, like their associational coun­ terparts, are reproduced at both local and national levels" (p.2). In other words, the political struggle conditions the perspectives of the first generation ofhumanist writers and specifically provides the ba­ sic contrast between Petrarch, whose writings reflect his association with the Visconti and other despotic signori, and Boccaccio, who worked and wrote for a Florentine commune governed, between 1343 and 1378, by an often uneasy coalition of disparate economic and social groups. Chaucer, both by his firsthand observation of Florence (1373) and Lombardy (1378), and by his reading of Petrarch and Boccaccio, under­ stood the issues at stake in the struggle between the two types of polity. In addition, "Chaucer's experience in seeking to establish and stabilize a distinctive poetics" is complicated by the "complex and conflicted" nature of "his own political positioning ...at the intersection of royal, magnate, and mercantile worlds," and his exposure to "a dizzying suc­ cession of polities, from the broadest-based associational model (peasant uprising) to the narrowest form ofhierarchy (the tyranny of Richard II). " Accordingly, "he functions within both associational and hierarchic forms; in responding to the exceptional complexity of fourteenth­ century English polity he is at once the poet ofFlorence and Lombardy" (p.64), engaged in "testing ... the structures (substructures and anti­ structures) of...