Medieval Studies Research Articles

La ricerca sulle fonti e le sue sfide

Abstract This essay presents a reflection on the so-called auxiliary sciences, starting from the volume published by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica on the occasion of its foundation 200 years ago. The papers of the volume are integrated into the broader international debate on the prospects of medieval studies, both in relation to the „digital turn“ and to the risk that the Middle Ages will become marginalized in university curricula and „irrelevant“ to contemporary society and politics.

Review: Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, by Jamie Kreiner

In Legions of Pigs, Jamie Kreiner uses pigs as a lens through which she examines the early medieval West from North Africa to the British Isles and Scandinavia. Pigs are unique among the medieval domestic mammals. Unlike cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and donkeys, pigs do not produce secondary products that can be extracted from live animals, such as milk, wool, hair, traction, and transport. Pigs produce meat and other primary products, such as skin and bone, that can be accessed only when a pig is slaughtered. Pigs are also biologically and behaviorally distinct from the other early medieval farm animals. They are smart and will eat almost anything, but they can be dangerous and require careful management so that they do not destroy agricultural fields and other aspects of the landscape and the built environment. Using pigs as a focal point, the chapters in this volume explore worldview and cosmology, agriculture and ecology, social organization, and religion across the late antique and early medieval West.The research that went into this volume is meticulous, and the scope of the volume is impressive. The geographic range includes North Africa, Iberia, and the Norse colonies in Iceland and Greenland, in addition to the more well-studied regions of early medieval western Europe, such as the British Isles and Francia. Kreiner is a documentary historian, but I was impressed with her knowledgeable and creative use of the archaeological and zooarchaeological data on early medieval animal husbandry and agriculture. She draws on zooarchaeological data to show how the relative importance of pigs in early medieval societies varied across both time and space. For example, while pigs played an important role in many early medieval societies, recent archaeological research has shown that they were introduced to Iceland at the beginning of the Norse settlement, but they declined rapidly thereafter, possible due to the damage that they did to the fragile environment.Kreiner begins by describing pigs as animals that provided meat, a commodity that early medieval people wanted, but also as animals that were intelligent and required management. She then links these animals to broader issues of early medieval cosmology and worldview. Her third chapter focuses on pigs in the early medieval landscape. This is where her interdisciplinary skills really shine. Kreiner draws on archaeological data to show how pig husbandry varied across the early medieval world as a result environmental differences and the choices that early medieval farmers and landowners made. She then explores the complex laws and negotiations that governed access to pannage for pigs in the woodlands during the acorn season. Kreiner’s historical data complement the archaeological evidence to provide a rich picture of early medieval pig management. Her next chapter explores the relationships between pigs and humans, ranging from the role of swineherds to the social context of pork consumption. Her final chapter explores the relationship between pigs and Christianity.The volume is extensively documented with over 50 pages of notes and a wide-ranging bibliography. It is also well illustrated with 32 pages of color plates, 7 useful maps that show the locations of the sites and regions discussed in the volume, and many black-and-white in-text figures.Early medieval studies are by their nature interdisciplinary, drawing on evidence from historical records, archaeological excavations, and art historical studies. This volume is one of the most creatively interdisciplinary volumes that I have had the pleasure to read. Kreiner has produced a truly multispecies history, using the relationships between pigs and people to explore the agrarian, social, and cultural history of the early medieval period. As a result, this book will be of great interest to early medievalists who work with texts and material culture, as well as scholars who work in interdisciplinary fields such as historical ecology and animal studies. I will use this book when I teach both medieval archaeology and zooarchaeology. My archaeology students will appreciate Kreiner’s careful and critical use of archaeological and zooarchaeological data, and they will benefit from her use of pigs as a lens to explore broader issues of early medieval cosmology, religion, and social organization. These issues are nearly impossible to study on the basis of archaeological data alone. The volume is clearly and engagingly written, and I recommend it in the highest possible terms.

Wege in eine mediävistische Komparatistik

Pathways into Medieval Comparative Literary Studies. With a Methodological Outlook Based on Religious Plays The literary traditions of the Middle Ages were interconnected across territorial and linguistic borders. Although there is general agreement that for this reason a comparative perspective is inscribed in medieval studies by virtue of its subject matter, there is still no ›medieval comparative literary studies‹. The article identifies central reasons for this desideratum, the lack of theoretical and methodological foundations in particular, and proposes four methods from textual analysis that can be used for medieval comparative inquiries on the basis of a semiotic approach. It thus aims to show perspectives for the foundation of medieval comparative literary studies, which must be achieved in collective work by scholars from all medieval literary fields.

(DE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORICAL NARRATION OF MODERN AMERICAN MEDIEVALISM: THE “INVENTION” OF THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS OF WESTEROS

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to deconstruct the constructed “historical” narrative in contexts of the social, political and economic features of the feudalism of the world of the Seven Kingdoms, imagined in the imitated narration of the American writer George Martin, presented in his novels that make up the “A Song of Ice and Fire” cycle.
 The novelty of the article lies in the study of the features of the social and economic history of the imagining medieval world of the Seven Kingdoms.
 Methodology. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles of interdisciplinary historiography proposed in intellectual and cultural histories, as well as in the study of medievalism as a synthetic form of mass ideas about the Middle Ages in modern consumer society.
 Results. It is assumed that George Martin proposed a model for the development of medieval society. The political relations and institutions described by G. Martin have parallels with those social forms of organization that arose and developed in the Medieval West. Therefore, in contexts of social history, the society described by George Martin can be defined as feudal. Critically analyzing George Martin’s texts as sources and deconstructing the narratives that form them, the author presumes that in the Seven Kingdoms the processes of feudal revolution led to the formation of a system of relations of vassalage and suzerainty. George Martin’s texts are a source on the history of the institutions of royalty, describing both the history of regional dynasties and the features of their subordination and integration into the state established as a result of the conquest of Westeros by Aegon I.
 Conclusions. The article shows that 1) George Martin became constructor of a parallel version of the social and political histories of the Middle Ages and feudalism, 2) George Martin proposed an image of the Middle Ages, genetically ascending in the history of Medieval Europe, 3) the analyzed texts can be identified as a source on the social, economic and political history of the Seven Kingdoms.

IMITATION AND SIMULATION OF THE MEDIEVAL NARRATIONS IN MODERN MEDIEVALISM: FEATURES OF THE STRUCTURE AND ITS (DE)CONSTRUCTION

Goal. The goal of the article is to analyze the constructed “medieval” narrative in the texts of George Martin and other American authors, who form synthetic versions of the political, social, cultural and religious history of the Seven Kingdoms.
 The novelty of the article lies in the study of the features of the historical narrative in the texts of George Martin in contexts of its imitation and simulation of the medieval narrative structure of the text in combination with elements and techniques of postmodern prose.
 Methodology. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles of interdisciplinary historiography proposed in intellectual and cultural history, as well as in the study of medievalism as a synthetic form of mass ideas about the Middle Ages in the modern consumer society.
 Results. It is assumed that George Martin and his co-authors proposed a successful model for imitation of the medieval historical narrative, simulating the style and narrative techniques of medieval historical writings. This article analyzes the problems of historical narrative in the contexts of imagination, invention, simulation, imitation, construction and deconstruction. The author analyzes the systemic themes that form the historical narrative of George Martin. The author believes that chronology, religiosity, the heterogeneous nature of the text, images of Otherness, the presence of a hero of history form the basis of the simulated medieval historical narrative. It is shown that George Martin’s texts formally imitate the style of medieval narration, but actually actualize the potential of simulation and imitation of modern postmodern culture.
 Conclusions. The article shows that 1) George Martin and his co-authors reproduce a conditional “medieval” text, which is actually a construct, 2) the analyzed text can be interpreted in the categories of construction, deconstruction, assimilation, simulation and imitation, 3) the analyzed narrative is a form of deconstruction of the past, constructing alternative and parallel images of the Middle Ages, 4) George Martin’s texts can be described as attempts to assimilate academic medievalism and mass cultural medievalism.

Automatic medieval charters structure detection : A Bi-LSTM linear segmentation approach

This paper presents a model aiming to automatically detect sections in medieval Latin charters. These legal sources are some of the most important sources for medieval studies as they reflect economic and social dynamics as well as legal and institutional writing practices. An automatic linear segmentation can greatly facilitate charter indexation and speed up the recovering of evidence to support historical hypothesis by the means of granular inquiries on these raw, rarely structured sources. Our model is based on a Bi-LSTM approach using a final CRF-layer and was trained using a large, annotated collection of medieval charters (4,700 documents) coming from Lombard monasteries: the CDLM corpus (11th-12th centuries). The evaluation shows a high performance in most sections on the test-set and on an external evaluation corpus consisting of the Montecassino abbey charters (10th-12th centuries). We describe the architecture of the model, the main problems related to the treatment of medieval Latin and formulaic discourse, and we discuss some implications of the results in terms of record-keeping practices in High Middle Ages.

Reception of John V. A. Fine Jr.’s The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation: Interesting Sleeve of a Never Ending Historiographical Debate

Historiography about the medieval Bosnian Church is a vast and complicated labyrinth, with many different sections and subsections regarding its teachings, where authors are least likely to find a compromise, or some common ground. Very often, the ruling ideologies have intertwined their interests and influences in this field of medieval study, causing the emergence of very intense emotions in wider circles of population. One remarkable episode in history of research and study of the Bosnian Church is the occurrence of medievalist from United States of America, John V. A. Fine Jr., who arrived in Bosnia and Yugoslavia at the peak of the Cold War. Fine proved to be a very meticulous researcher, who produced a book under the title: The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation. A Study of the Bosnian Church and its Place in State and Society from the 13th to the 15th Centuries which immediately caused disturbance and wide range of reactions. With his aligning with the historiographical stream which doesn’t see the Bosnian Church as a dualistic heretical institution, rather a monastic community independent from both of the big churches of the time, Fine gave additional fuel to this theory, a theory somewhat weakened in that period as its main protagonist Jaroslav Šidak had a change of mind. The main goal of this paper is to study the immediate reactions on Fine’s thesis, in forms of reviews of his book, as well its influence in the subsequent decades of the historiographical studies of the Bosnian Church.

Cluster on Medieval Studies and Secondary Education:Introduction

Introduction to the special cluster on incorporating medieval studies into secondary education curricula, including a discussion of partnership between secondary, post-secondary and community institutions, and their importance.

Editors’ Introduction: Creative Community-Building in Times of Crisis

This issue includes a cluster on medieval studies and secondary education, contributions on pedagogy and teaching and learning centers, as well as contributions to two regular features: “How I Teach” and “Conversations.”

Middle Ages for Educators

The website Middle Ages for Educators was created in the spring of 2020. It was designed for teachers, students, and any members of the broader public who want to learn about Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (c. 300-1500 C.E.). It provides resources for both teaching and research, including short videos by world-renowned experts accompanied by discussion questions and primary source materials, introductions to medieval digital projects, workshops on how to use digital tools to study the medieval past, and curated links to associated websites with medieval content, images, digitized manuscripts, or other medieval materials. This article discusses the history, present use, and future goals of the website. It explains how it was founded, its evolution, and how and why it arrived at its current home at Princeton University. It offers examples and links of the various resources found on the site, and finally reflects on the place of the website in the current and future teaching of medieval studies, in and beyond the universities.

The emerging digital infrastructure for research in the humanities

This article advances the thesis that three decades of investments by national and international funders, combined with those of scholars, technologists, librarians, archivists, and their institutions, have resulted in a digital infrastructure in the humanities that is now capable of supporting end-to-end research workflows. The article refers to key developments in the epigraphy and paleography of the premodern period. It draws primarily on work in classical studies but also highlights related work in the adjacent disciplines of Egyptology, ancient Near East studies, and medieval studies. The argument makes a case that much has been achieved but it does not declare “mission accomplished.” The capabilities of the infrastructure remain unevenly distributed within and across disciplines, institutions, and regions. Moreover, the components, including the links between steps in the workflow, are generally far from user-friendly and seamless in operation. Because further refinements and additional capacities are still much needed, the article concludes with a discussion of key priorities for future work.

Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud, eds. Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. Pp. 336. £88.00 (cloth).

Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud, eds. Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. Pp. 336. £88.00 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 4

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Contributors

CHRISTINE COOPER-ROMPATO received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. She is professor of English at Utah State University, where she teaches and researches medieval literature and religious studies. Her most recent book is Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons (2022), and she is currently working on several projects involving the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer's reception in the nineteenth century. Cooper-Rompato also publishes on American history, and her articles on the earliest women patent holders in Utah and Utah in the Green Book appeared in earlier volumes of UHQ.DAVID A. HALES is the former director and librarian of Westminster College's Giovale Library. He is professor of Library Science emeritus, University of Alaska Fairbanks. He holds a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University, a Master of Library Science from Drexel University, and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been active in many professional organizations and has served as president of four associations. Hales has delivered papers at library science and history conferences and has published extensively in library science, genealogy, and history journals, including UHQ and Alaska History. He is the co-author of Alaska Sources: A Guide to Historical Records and Information Resources.SARAH LANGSDON is head of Special Collections and associate professor at Weber State University, where she has worked since 1999. She holds a Master in History from Utah State University and a Master of Library Science with a focus on archives from San Jose State University. She is the co-author of five books on the history of Ogden, including Legendary Locals of Ogden, Utah and Ogden: The Charles Maccarthy Photographs. She is active in organizations such as the Conference of Intermountain Archivists, Utah Manuscripts Association, and the Oral History Association. Langsdon's research interests include the history of Ogden, Twenty-Fifth Street, women, crime, and oral history.ALISON MCNEAL is professor emeritus, Slippery Rock University. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Kent State University. At Slippery Rock, she helped to establish two interdisciplinary minors, one in Asian Studies and another in European Studies through the support of federally funded NEH grants. She has reviewed scores of books for Choice, ranging from critical theory to Gender Studies. McNeal taught in China and went to the Middlebury Language School for Mandarin Studies in 2012. Currently, she facilitates a community book group for her local public library and belongs to a poetry circle.SUSAN SESSIONS RUGH is professor of American History and dean of Undergraduate Education at Brigham Young University. Her book, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, received national attention for its nostalgic portrayal of midcentury road trips. Her 2006 article, “Branding Utah: Industrial Tourism in the Modern West,” won the Best Utah History Article Award from the Utah Division of State History and the Michael P. Malone Award from the Western History Association. She has received research fellowships from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and was recognized by Utah Humanities with the Mayor's Award in the Humanities.LINDA MURIEL ZABRISKIE was born and educated in Mt. Pleasant, Utah. In 1968, she graduated from Utah State University with a degree in English; she went on to teach at Delta High School, Wasatch Academy, North Sanpete High School, Beaver High School, Milford High School, Roland Hall, and at Kearns High School for twenty years. At the age of sixty-six, Zabriskie received a PhD in History from the University of Utah. In addition to her dissertation about Elbert Thomas, Zabriskie wrote about the First Presbyterian Church in Mt. Pleasant, for which she had a special affection, and Wasatch Academy, with which she had a long relationship. She passed away in December 2015.

Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, eds., Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, with an introduction by David Perry and an afterword by Geraldine Heng. (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies.) New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Paper. Pp. 308; many black-and-white figures. $20. ISBN: 978-0-8232-8556-3. Table of contents available online

Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, eds., <i>Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past</i>, with an introduction by David Perry and an afterword by Geraldine Heng. (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies.) New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Paper. Pp. 308; many black-and-white figures. $20. ISBN: 978-0-8232-8556-3. Table of contents available online

Celebrating Saint Bonaventure Eight Hundred Years after His Birth

Celebrating Saint Bonaventure Eight Hundred Years after His Birth Joshua C. Benson ONCE IN CONVERSATION with a colleague (a Thomist, who shall remain nameless), he remarked with surprise that scholarship on Bonaventure, like scholarship on Aquinas, seemed to constitute its own world. Scholarship on great figures like Bonaventure does form a world, even a universe, one that includes both the scholarly universe of the moment and that same universe extended backwards in time. In 2020, The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University published Saint Bonaventure: Friar, Teacher, Minister, Bishop. A Celebration of the Eighth Centenary of His Birth1—but in order better to assess this work, a brief overview of some major celebratory volumes published in Bonaventure’s honor may be helpful. In 1874, the sixth centenary of Bonaventure’s death, Fidelis a Fanna published Ratio novae collectionis operum omnium . . . S. Bonaventurae (Turin, 1874). This volume provided a fore-taste of and rationale for the edition of Bonaventure’s Opera omnia published between 1882 and 1902 at Quaracchi (outside of Florence). A new appreciation for Bonaventure arose from that edition since it included texts, such as his three sets of [End Page 663] disputed questions, that had been forgotten since perhaps the fourteenth century, and it eliminated from Bonaventure’s corpus many other texts (especially of “spirituality”) with which he had long been associated. As that edition and a new Bonaventure emerged into print, medieval studies emerged more fully as a discipline, infused with energy by Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879). The twentieth century’s greatest scholars began a close study of Bonaventure with the new edition in hand, among them Etienne Gilson and a Franciscan friar he helped establish at St. Bonaventure College near Olean, New York, Philotheus Boehner. These two men helped found the two most important intellectual centers in North America for the study of medieval thought: the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and The Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure College (later University). While Gilson is famous to many, Boehner is better known to students of Franciscana, since he helped establish the critical edition of William of Ockham’s works and a series to translate the works of Bonaventure at The Franciscan Institute. Both series are still in print and are still essential to teaching and research in the Franciscan tradition. From 1874 and the foretaste of a new Bonaventure, we must leap to 1974, when a series of celebrations for the seventh centenary of Bonaventure’s death resulted in two great collections of scholarly essays. A five-volume collection entitled S. Bonaventura 1274–1974, published by the same college that edited Bonaventure’s Opera omnia, includes contributions by an incredibly distinguished list of scholars. The first volume opens with a citation from Étienne Gilson; the fourth volume with a previously unpublished note of Philotheus Boehner, who had died suddenly on May 22, 1955. The five volumes were arranged topically, covering Bonaventure’s portrayal in art, his life and writings, philosophy, theology, and a final volume that provides a massive bibliography. The volumes are still an essential reference point for scholars, given the exceptional quality of the participants: among them Louis Jacques Bataillon, Jacques Guy Bougerol, Palémon Glorieux, James McEvoy, Bernard McGinn, Anton Pegis, Walter Principe, Michael Schmaus, [End Page 664] Fernand Van Steenberghen, Paul Vignaux, and Grover Zinn. The volumes seemed to be a who’s who, not just of the Bonaventurean world, but of the medieval scholarly world. Another collection, entitled San Bonaventura maestro di vita francescana e di sapienza christiana, published in 1976, arose from a major gathering in Rome for the seventh centenary of Bonaventure’s death. Paul VI gave the initial address. Published in three volumes, the first volume includes nearly one thousand pages on Bonaventure’s life and general issues in his thought. Volumes 2 and 3 are briefer and contain essays focused on specific theological and philosophical themes. These volumes also include a distinguished international list of scholars (some of whom also contributed to S. Bonaventura): Camille Bérubé, Ignatius Brady, Jean Châttilon, Ewert Cousins, Luigi Pellegrini, and Wayne Hellmann—a friar who sought to work with a theologian named Joseph Ratzinger...

Jordan Kirk. Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. Fordham Series in Medieval Studies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 187. $30.00 (paper).

Jordan Kirk. Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. Fordham Series in Medieval Studies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 187. $30.00 (paper). - Volume 61 Issue 4

Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

Concept of Medieval Studies: Definition of concepts, differences in use across Regions, Non-applicability

Concept of Medieval Studies: Definition of concepts, differences in use across Regions, Non-applicability

Нотированная рукопись как «открытый текст»

The scientific concept of "open text" (U. Eco) is applicable to various humanities, including musical medieval studies, primarily to ancient Russian singing manuscripts. The liturgical purpose does not contradict the introduction of additions and corrections in the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic fields of them at all stages of the work, as well as after its completion. The updates ("ponowlenija") affect on the one hand, the structure of each manuscript, on the other – its hymnographic and singing texts highlighted for consideration in this article. They relate directly to the notated texts, which in their original presentation (without updates) appear as complete chants, and open, if we consider all the updates introduced into it later by the author of the manuscript or subsequent masters. At the same time the completeness of the chant and its openness do not contradict each other; both variants can be chosen for performance. In the article, the features of the plaintext are considered on the example of the manuscript of the 16th century of the collection of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra of the Russian State Library No. 420, demonstrating the active work on it of both the author and subsequent masters. The introduction of new elements concerns, in addition to the structure of the manuscript, the writing out of variants of the hymnographic text, the inclusion of new chants in place of existing or absent ones from the author of the manuscript; the use of unusual neumes, not characteristic of znamenny notation in general; the designation of "superfluous" chants; the "programming" of improvisational updates, in particular, in the genre of the "Mnogoletija (Perennial). Many aspects of additions and transformations allow us to speak about the active creative work of the masters with ancient Russian hymnographic and musical texts, the openness of which provided an infinite wealth of chants.