Medieval Studies Research Articles

Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook

Reviewed by: Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook Mark-Allan Donaldson David Crook, Robin Hood: Legend and Reality ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), 298 pp., 14 ills. Medieval studies is often a difficult place to inhabit. Whether it be a stray lacunae, singed page, or unfinished manuscript, there is an almost constant sense that the information being dealt with and studied comes secondhand or clouded in an esotericism that previous generations of scholars found romantic. This is accompanied by the general fictionalization of the Middle Ages by the periods that follow, with researchers having to simultaneously grapple with the task of getting at the truth of the matter while also figuring out what exactly truth may have meant to the people, objects, and literatures they are studying. It is into this quagmire that David Crook steps with his interrogation into the pseudo-historical/semi-mythical figure of Robin Hood. Crook, an archivist who has been building interest in his subject since incidentally encountering a reference to the thirteenth-century criminal William Robehod, sets out in this work to formulate a distinct approach to discussing the category of medieval personage into which Robin Hood fits. There is a tension throughout the book between previous literary and historical approaches. The former, in Crook's opinion, while giving the canon of Robin Hood texts apt attention, focuses too much on the text as an object removed from its historical contexts in the same way a physicist may ignore friction to make an equation work; while the latter, despite approaching the interrogation of Robin Hood's reality in a more familiar manner to an archivist, tends to write off the interrogation itself as illogical given the minimal hard evidence for the figure's historicity based on the surviving medieval material. This tension is somewhat resolved by the method Crook utilizes, which, while not explicitly labeled, is a type of synergistic approach to literary and historical criticism that utilizes the meticulous nature of archival work to build a supposition based on textual evidence and effect. The text is separated into two main parts, each with its own chapters. The first part, "The Legend and Its Interpreters," is split into chapters that first move chronologically through the significant texts that make up the canon of Robin Hood literature. In this part, Crook manages to create a wonderful and referenceable survey of major works that details when they are thought to have been produced, their significance in terms of what is contributed to the legend textually (characters, locations, plot points, etc.), and how each text aids the development of the literature metatextually. This literary survey is injected with moments of historical analysis wherein Crook discusses elements of various texts that could hint at an accurate dating for a story's composition, or for a possible historical Robin Hood. The only drawback to this part is that Crook does not spend much [End Page 243] time analyzing the nuance of the medieval perspective. For instance, when drawing attention to A Lyttel Gest of Robin Hood's assumption that Robin was a real figure, Crook does not aptly consider the tradition of false truth claims or fictions that begin medieval texts. He does not allow for the medieval text and reader to participate in creating/absorbing fiction; nor is there an acknowledgement of the medieval phenomena of truth as something separate from fact, nor of a text's ability to create and disseminate a truth that is outside of modernity's notion of "objective truth." Following the survey of primary medieval sources, Crook then moves into a similarly chronological overview of the academic interest surrounding Robin Hood and the relative increase or lack of interest in his historicity depending on the time and academic discipline. The final chapter of this part moves away from the predominantly textual foundation of Crook's discussion and into an analysis of place names connected to the Robin Hood legend. Functionally, this chapter explores the possible dissemination of information about Robin Hood and charts the rise of the popularity of his person and legend. More importantly to Crook's methodology, this discussion of places serves as a means of connecting Robin Hood to reality...

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie

Reviewed by: Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie Katharine Jager Cary Howie. Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 190 pp. $130.00. Cary Howie's Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body is a series of comparative readings, or what he calls "an especially concentrated set of turns and returns" (53), that range across a wide selection of texts including contemporary American lyric poetry, Italian and French medieval poetry, medieval theology and hagiography, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In a delicate, beautiful mash-up, Howie presses together seemingly disparate texts to marshal claims about meditation, theology, desire, and the bounds of the embodied self. Comprising nine brief chapters, the book is also framed by a series of Howie's original free-verse poems or "interludes" that reflect concerns with lyric [End Page 405] questions of praise, deixis, prayer, and belief, expressed in a diction that is simultaneously casual ("face down / ass up, that's the way we like"; xi) and theological (as expressed in the title on Interlude 2: "Puking Prayer"; 125). As he notes, "the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking," and poetry itself "takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer" (9). Howie begins with an analysis of American poet Mary Szybist's poem "The Troubadours, Etc.," which he uses to ground his notion of "transfiguration," or an embodied, spiritual "light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear" (1). "Transfiguration" guides Howie's concept of "lyric medievalism," or the ways that the contemporary poets he reads "have started to sound like medieval theologians, or, in fact, like certain holistic modern readers of medieval theology, especially in their accounts of the human body in its limitations and at its limits" (147), and he presses twentieth-century anglophone poetry against medieval theological texts. For instance, Howie's first chapter, "Toward Transfiguration," reads Laura Kasischke, Matt Donovan, the account in Matthew's Gospel of the hemorrhaging woman reaching for Christ's hem, Linda Hull, Aquinas, Augustine, Marie Howe, and Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, to argue that "to be transfigured is to undergo, at the surface of the body, an intensification of this body that does not leave it intact, if by 'intact' we understand all too literally, 'untouched'" (24). His second chapter, "Saints, Poets, and Other Crossover Artists," extends this concern for the body's edges and apertures. Using Barbara Newman's concept of the medieval crossover artist to weave readings of sci-fi; mid-century American fiction; Boccaccio; philosophy; theology; medieval studies; and the lyrics of Mary Karr, Kasischke, and Mary Oliver, Howie argues that these writers are able to express "something so fundamentally accommodating of the world—its ugliness, its beauty—that it challenges the very discursive and categorical prejudices of our critical language" (44). Chapter 3, "Monastic Poetics," is Howie's strongest chapter. In it, he considers discretio across and through readings of Jane Hirshfield, Foucault, the Conferences of John Cassian, Benedict's Rule, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Thomas Merton on Mark Van Doren, Guigo II the Carthusian's Ladder of Monks, Melissa Range's "Shell White," and Marilyn Hacker's "Annunciation, 8 A.M." Howie argues here that monastic poetics, in its use of discernment and discipline, is "not afraid to find occasions for prayer in situations of impurity" (68). His fourth chapter, "Waiting for the Middle Ages," considers Catherine Brown, Carla Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw's [End Page 406] recent claims about temporality and medievalism to wonder "how we, singularly and in common, are taken by the objects and the persons we attend to and how they, more often than not, if we wait for and with them, take us by surprise" (74–75). Howie reads Beroul's Tristan; Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion; Dante's Inferno, XVI; Bernard of Clairvaux; Caroline Bynum; Marie Howe's "The Gate"; theology; literary criticism; and philosophy; as well as Paul's letter to the Romans; to...

«Ирландская сага»: в поисках дефиниции объекта

Using the term saga in Russian and European criticism is studied. The term denotes Old Irish epic tales. The relation between oral and written narrative traditions is described. Under investigation is the semantic content of the Russian term with the following: 1. the English (saga) and the German (die Sage) scholarly texts describing the same denotates 2. the Icelandic notion saga having a much wider semantic field in the original tradition (though not in mediaeval studies) 3. the semantic field of the original term scél having tale or story as one of its meanings. The work also states the recursive semantic shift tale, story → an event worthy of making a tale of, a piece of news. The shift is also evident in the semantic evolution of the Russian term istoriya. The conclusion points out the relativity of the frame of the term saga as a mediaeval literature’s genre and the necessity to appeal to a scholar’s intuition.

Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction ed. by Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud

Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction ed. by Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud

The Social Fabric of Fifteenth-Century Florence: Identities and Change in the World of Second-Hand Dealers. Alessia Meneghin. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies. New York: Routledge, 2020. xii + 238 pp. $150.

The Social Fabric of Fifteenth-Century Florence: Identities and Change in the World of Second-Hand Dealers. Alessia Meneghin. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies. New York: Routledge, 2020. xii + 238 pp. $150.

Table of Contents

medieval worlds provides a forum for comparative, interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Its aim is to overcome disciplinary boundaries, regional limits and national research traditions in Medieval Studies, to open up new spaces for discussion, and to help developing global perspectives. We focus on the period from c. 400 to 1500 CE but do not stick to rigid periodization. medieval worlds is open to submissions of broadly comparative studies and matters of global interest, whether in single articles, companion papers, smaller clusters, or special issues on a subject of global/comparative history. We particularly invite studies of wide-ranging connectivity or comparison between different world regions. Apart from research articles, medieval worlds publishes ongoing debates and project and conference reports on comparative medieval research. Medieval Biographical Collections: Perspectives from Buddhist, Christian and Islamic Worlds Guest editors: Daniel Mahoney, Diarmuid Ó Riain and Giorgia Vocino Editorial Walter Pohl and Ingrid Hartl Introduction Medieval Biographical Collections in Comparison Daniel Mahoney and Giorgia Vocino Introductory Comparative Chapters Compilation Strategies Daniel Mahoney and Diarmuid Ó Riain Writing Strategies Reinier Langelaar, Giorgia Vocino and Veronika Wieser Audience and Reception Rutger Kramer and Graeme Ward Case Studies Many Lives, One Story: The Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium and the Making of Redon Rutger Kramer Biography and Hierarchy: The Tibetan Ruling House of Phag-mo-gru and the Singular Volume of the Rlangs (Rlangs-kyi-po-ti-bse-ru) Reinier Langelaar Reading Jerome’s De viris illustribus in the Post-Roman World: Cataloguing Community in Gennadius of Marseille and Frechulf of Lisieux Graeme Ward and Veronika Wieser Shaping Community through Biographical Collections from South Arabia: A Comparison of Two Ṭabaqāt-works Johann Heiss Compiling the Deeds of Salzburg Saints: The 12th-Century De episcopis Salisburgensibus and the Monastery of Admont Diarmuid Ó Riain Obituaries in Service of the Rasūlid Sultanate in Yemen at the Turn of the 9th/15th Century Daniel Mahoney Creating a Sense of Glorious Destiny. Mastery of Speech in the Libellus de Situ Civitatis Mediolani (Late 10th-Early 11th Centuries) Giorgia Vocino Conclusion Communities and Contexts: Concluding Thoughts on Medieval Biographical Collections Diarmuid Ó Riain

Research Methods Primary Sources

Adam Matthew Digital's (AMD) product Research Methods Primary Sources (RMPS) is designed to offer a way for pedagogues to enhance their teaching of archival and historical documents by integrating digital case studies and learning tools like interviews with archivists, librarians, and conservators to help students evaluate, utilize, and interpret primary sources in academic research. This product would be useful across the humanities including literary, medieval, global, and media studies, but most particularly within the context of history courses. And there is ample material related to gender, disability, race, and other critical studies that operate across disciplines. Research Methods Primary Sources works on its own, though it is enhanced with additional subscriptions to Adam Matthew Digital primary source collections.

The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities. Rose-Marie Peake. Crossing Boundaries: Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 246 pp. €99.

The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities. Rose-Marie Peake. Crossing Boundaries: Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 246 pp. €99.

Lachmanns Erbe. Editionsmethoden in klassischer Philologie und germanistischer Mediävistik, ed. Anna Kathrin Bleuler and Oliver Primavesi. Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 19. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2022, 614 pp.

Abstract Old and New Philology, or textual and material philology, reproduce a perhaps already outdated binary in 2022, as researchers have developed and quickly adapted to hybrid approaches since Stephen G. Nichol’s introduction to the special volume of Speculum in 1990 (Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 1–10). That clarion call for a return to manuscript philology and codicological consideration of physical textual histories raises no objections today, demonstrating the degree to which a once somewhat critical apprehension of the then-developing approach has been subsumed under the general rubric of Medieval Studies in general and philology in particular (see, for example, Susan Yager, “New Philology,” Handbook of Medieval Studies. Terms – Methods – Trends, ed. Albrecht Classen, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011, 999–1006). Lachmanns Erbe brings the state of the field forward, primarily from German, French, and Italian perspectives as a bridge between Lachmann and the present.

Staff and Activity of the Section of Medieval History at the Institute of History of the Russian Association of Scientific Research Institutes (1921–1929)

This article is devoted to the activities of the Section of Medieval History which was a structural department of the Institute of History at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University (1921–1925) and later joined the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences (RANION) (1925–1929). Relying on minutes of the section and records and reports of the Institute of History, the authors demonstrate that the staff of the section headed by D. M. Petrushevsky remained faithful to the high academic standards of the Russian pre-revolutionary school, which was formulated in the aims and tasks of the section and was reflected in the research problems, as well as the level and quality of publications and the reports made. The scholars and instructors of the section did not teach classes to students but were focused on their research and postgraduate work. There were only minor changes in the composition of the Section, which included seven members and five postgraduate students. At the same time, the Medieval History Section was one of the most productive in the Institute, actively publishing monographs, translations of medieval sources, articles, and reviews. The topics and content of the publications, papers, and discussions show that the section’s research agenda was dominated by the socioeconomic issues of the early Middle Ages, the history of the medieval city, and debatable and topical issues of medieval studies. The authors of the article also pay attention to papers of graduate students not assigned to the Section, some of which had academic merit and were subsequently published. The academic discourse and research fields of the Section’s historians testify to their neglect of topics and approaches relevant for Soviet Marxism.

Cross-Cultural Relations in the Early Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: The Canons of the Council of Nablus, 1120. Winner of the Nottingham Medieval Studies Postgraduate Essay Competition

The First Crusade (1095–1099) culminated in the establishment of four Latin Christian polities in the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. For the ensuing two centuries, a relatively small Latin population ruled over and lived amongst the religiously and ethnically heterogeneous populations of the Levant. In this time, the Latins also produced a particularly extensive and rich body of laws and legal texts, the study of which provides a window into the nature and quality of their relationship with their Levantine subjects. This article specifically analyses cross-cultural relationships in the early Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. It does so through an analysis of the harsh treatment of Levantine groups in one early legal text which has been relatively neglected by crusades historians: the Canons of the Council of Nablus, 1120.

Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517 by Wolfgang P. Müller

Reviewed by: Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517 by Wolfgang P. Müller Richard H. Helmholz Müller, Wolfgang P. Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021. Pp. viii, 270. $99.00. ISBN: 978-1-10884-542-7. A little more than fifty years ago the late Michael Sheehan published an article in Mediaeval Studies devoted to the church's matrimonial law as it was applied in English practice. His article was based upon evidence he had found in fourteenth century court records from the diocese of Ely. It was something new—an experiment—and a successful one. A flood of scholarly studies like the one he initiated have come into existence during the years that followed. This would probably have been a surprise to him. The prevailing attitude among scholars then was that the law of the church was fully stated in the Corpus iuris canonici. Cases from the courts were regarded simply as examples of the results the formal law required. They were of no special significance. Today this attitude among scholars has changed. Studies of the history of marriage and divorce derived from medieval record sources have multiplied, and they have come from many European lands. By my count, the bibliography of secondary sources in the book under review contains 235 scholarly books and articles devoted to the history of the canon law of marriage. Of that number only nineteen predate Sheehan's article, and virtually all of them were studies of the formal canon law. What a change! How should we account for it? There is certainly more than one plausible explanation. Perhaps the initial revelation that there was a divergence between formal law and law in practice itself encouraged further research. Once it had been recognized, scholars changed their mind about the sufficiency of the older and more formal approach to the subject. Or perhaps it was the Anglo-American assumption drawn from common law that encouraged further study drawn from court records. No common lawyer would draw a legal conclusion without looking at the relevant case law. Why should the church's law be an exception? Or maybe it was the fact that the voices and the [End Page 233] interests of women came to the fore in matrimonial disputes in a more direct way than they did in disputes over tithes or ecclesiastical benefices. Paying attention to matrimonial disputes was itself may have been spurred by the greater numbers of women entering the academy during the past fifty years. Or perhaps it was just something new and different. Novelty is a path to tenure. Is there a correct answer to the question? I can only guess. What I can say with more confidence is that the comparative approach does prove appropriate for this subject, and indeed that, once undertaken, it has proved to be a healthy development. It was time, therefore, that someone should undertake a large and more general comparative view of the subject. Müller's work is the first book length work to undertake a Europe-wide approach to this subject, and it is a good development. Of course, this approach is not an invention. Prior scholarship from the pen of Charles Donahue has demonstrated what can be learned from taking a comparative approach. His two edited volumes in Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History that were published by Duncker & Humblot in 1989 and 1994 have also encouraged a wider approach by calling attention to the contents of ecclesiastical archives in many lands. However, no one has attempted anything as ambitious as Müller's monograph. It is drawn from record evidence found in French, German, English, Italian and Spanish archives, and it opens up the subject in useful ways by taking this geographical scope. Most fundamental of the results is the author's conclusion that a real divide existed between the South (Italy and Spain) and the North (England and Germany). The former adopted a notarial culture; the latter did not. This meant that most marriage contracts in the South were entered into and their full terms put into writing by notaries public rather than being contracted orally...

Grains of Gold – Compiling an Historical Anthology of Occitan Literature

Grains of Gold – Compiling an Historical Anthology of Occitan Literature James Thomas Some endeavours are so foreboding they might be considered acts of folly. The compilation of a 780–page anthology of Occitan literature with English translations could be — to those with an interest in such matters — a prime example. Most scholars and researchers of Occitan from English-speaking nations are, so the argument goes, medievalists, for whom whatever happened after 1400 to the first Romance language of the French Midi is of no real concern. There is some truth in this assertion. Each year produces new monographs on troubadour culture, multilingualism in southern France during the Albigensian Crusades, gender and religious dissent in Provence or — periodically —annotated editions and bilingual anthologies of courtly lyric poetry before 1300. If scholars stray into the Baroque period, little-known Eighteenth Century, or post-Revolutionary era, it is usually as social or economic historians studying the development of a particular city, industry or profession or — closer to the contemporary age — sociolinguists charting bilingualism or language shift and Romance philologists concerned with dialectal or morphological variation. The situation in France — and, to varying degrees, Catalonia, Italy, and Germany — is very different. Despite the path-breaking work of a small, disparate collection of literary historians and translators — William Calin, Catherine Aldington, Rosemary Lloyd, and Patrick Hutchinson, among others — the late twentieth century saw very little institutional change in the idea prevalent in and around Anglophone French Studies1 that Occitan literature died around 1300 — with the miraculous nineteenth-century exception of Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914). In fact, francophone social historians, such as Robert A. Schneider and William H. Sewell Jr., have often shown greater affinity with later Occitan writers — for Schneider, the Toulousain [End Page 127] poet Pèire Godolin (1580–1649), for Sewell, the Marseillais chanteur Victor Gelu (1806–1885) — than their literary confrères in post-medieval French Studies. It was thus with some trepidation (though great enthusiasm) that, in 2010, I embarked on Grains of Gold, a five-year project to produce a comprehensive — though evidently non-exhaustive — bilingual anthology of Occitan literature from the tenth century to the present day. My own credentials for such an undertaking were (hopefully) sound, having, since 2005, completed two successful Masters Degrees in Occitan-related matters. The first — a research M. Phil (University of Bristol) supervised by Catherine Léglu and externally examined by Peter Davies (University of Glasgow) — was a comparative study of two iconic nineteenth-century Occitan figures: Ganges-born savant and poet Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825) and the afore-mentioned Victor Gelu (1806–1885). The second — an MA in Translation (University of Exeter, 2010) — included a well-received dissertation on French and English translations of medieval Occitan troubadours during the Age of Romanticism. This grounding in medieval and post-medieval Occitan would soon be buttressed by a trilogy of published chapters on the Occitan reception of Dante in the nineteenth century. At heart a dix-neuvièmiste with a penchant for translation, I was able, through this research, to contemplate a bilingual anthology emanating from a core of medieval studies, romantic medievalism, and social romanticism. From one angle, Bernart de Ventadorn and the Comtessa de Dia: from another, Frédéric Mistral and the Agen hairdresser-poet Jacques Jasmin (1798–1864): from a third, the history of Anglophone reception of Occitan. Robert Lafont and Christian Anatole’s important Nouvelle histoire de la littérature occitane helped set broad generic and temporal parameters as well as identify major authors whose exclusion would be unthinkable. This led me to the more concentrated, period-specific Occitan-French anthologies such as Lafont’s Anthologie des baroques occitans, Pierre Bec’s Le Siècle d’or de la poésie gasconne, and Jean Eygun’s Camins dubèrts: [End Page 128] Anthologie bilingue de poésie occitane contemporaine. Jean-Claude Rixte’s indispensable online database Li Tèxts literaris occitans en anglès was a hugely stimulating resource for charting prior historical translations and receptions of Occitan in the Anglosphere. Peter Ricketts — whose British Library research contributed to this database — had previously offered generous assistance and support for my research on Fabre d...

Foucault's Work: A Reminiscence of Ancient Days

Foucault's Work:A Reminiscence of Ancient Days Timothy Hampton (bio) In May of 1982 I received a message from Paul Bouissac, a professor of French at the University of Toronto, to come to his office. I had just completed an MA in comparative literature and was preparing to move south, back to the United States. Toronto's comparative literature program was going through a transition. Several of my favorite professors were leaving. It was time for me to leave, too. Bouissac was a noted semiologist who had been a circus performer at one point in France, and had written a well-received study of the semiotics of the circus. He informed me that the university was hosting a Summer Semiotics Institute in June, at which a number of visitors would be coming to teach for a month. Would I be interested in working for Michel Foucault, as his research assistant, in return for free tuition? Foucault was at that point involved in his work on the techniques of self-construal in late antiquity and the early Christian period. He had just published The Care of the Self. With Jacques Derrida, he was one of the figure heads of a strangely named invention called "French Theory," a fantasy in the American imaginary that there was a club of French guys (and one gal, Julia Kristeva) who sat around in Paris and cooked up new concepts to animate the careers of ambitious American academics. Of the various French theoreticians, Foucault was the one I found most appealing, because of his interest in history. As an undergraduate, I had read and loved his book on madness. So, I signed on. The short-lived Semiotics Institute was a summa of academic stardom. In addition to Foucault, the philosopher John Searle was a headliner, along with Umberto Eco, whose novel The Name of the Rose had just come out in Italian. There were other experts: a scholar of Bakhtin, a hard-core linguistic semiotician, and, for a few weeks, the great medievalist Eugene Vance. Eco was still known mostly as a slightly eccentric essayist who sometimes wrote about modern art. He got third billing, after Foucault and Searle. I was summoned to meet Foucault on opening day, in an office in Victoria College. It was a brutally hot and humid Toronto day—a day on which no reasonable human would venture out in anything more than a [End Page 377] light shirt. Foucault appeared in a black leather biker's jacket, an advertisement, as I took it, of his sexuality, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and a moment when black leather was still associated with a certain gay male identity. He was friendly and funny, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was reading and trying to do. As the institute shifted into full speed, Foucault offered lectures, to a large crowd, and a seminar, to a group of about fifteen students. The lectures were the main event. Foucault had a set of texts in English that he read from, about the practices of monasticism in late antiquity and the early Christian periods. He was especially interested in John Cassian, the fourth-century monk who had been instrumental in spreading the practices of monasticism to the Christian West. What were the techniques that Cassian proposed? What was the logic he used to justify and shape monastic practice? It soon became clear that my job was not the job of research assistant at all. I was to be a language consultant and a bodyguard. Each day Foucault would read his lecture text, and each day there would be questions. Many of them came from students in Toronto's venerable Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. These were people who really took medieval Christianity seriously. They were perfect foils for Foucault, because they were skeptical of absolutely everything he said. They were not impressed by his fame, and they pushed back after each lecture. One student, in particular, was writing a thesis on Iamblichus, the third-century Neoplatonist who had been a biographer of Pythagoras. He challenged Foucault insistently on the details of monastic practice. Each time he opened his mouth Foucault would mutter, somewhat...

“Libros de privilegios” from the Castilian Towns of 13—14th Centuries

Modern medieval studies consider the “Libros de Privilegios” as an important and very informative source for the history of medieval municipal administration and the town chanceries. These manuscripts, being essentially cartularies, constitute a special group of legal texts originating from the city. The features of their codicology, paleography and illumination make it possible to study the development of document management practices in cities. The article compares the “Libros de Privilegios” from four towns of the Kingdom of Castile — Toledo, Seville, Murcia and Lorca. Ordered by concejos to municipal scribes, they testify to a common vector of development of municipal government in different towns, regardless of the time of their inclusion in the Kingdom of Castile. The books of privileges considered in the article were compiled in the period from the last quarter 13th century until the end of the 30s of the 14th century, although the Fuero of Toledo taken as a basis in them was formed and was issued in the form of a charter in the first quarter of the 13th century. After the consejos received from the king the Fuero of Toledo in the version of 1222 as a fundamental document regulating local legal life, they later either independently selected documents for inclusion in their «Libros de Privilegios» (Toledo, Seville, Murcia), or determined a sample for copying (Lorca).

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

СРЕДНЕВЕКОВЫЕ ЦЕРКОВНЫЕ БЛАГОСЛОВЕНИЯ (BENEDICTIONES) В ДИАЛОГЕ КУЛЬТУР

Benedictions (Benedictiones) are liturgic rites in Catholic church, pronounced by a priest on individual occasions. Medieval studies viewed benedictions and sacramentals (sacramentalia) as a “clerical magic” due to multiple superstitions that surrounded these practices. The article uses Yu. M. Lotman’s communicative model of culture, which can be viewed as semiotically unbalanced (“core” and “periphery”, including foreign semiotic elements), to present destructive changes in this segment of the liturgy as temporary, corresponding to a certain phase of dynamic interaction of two separate cultures — the clerical one (written) and traditional (oral) culture of ordinary believers. The zone of their closest contact is the religious life in the parish, which the author correlates with the cultural periphery, where cross-border interaction takes place (dialogue between the “core” and “periphery”) thus producing the universal communication code (“semiotization”). It was at the level of the local parishes that a number of “unofficial” benedictions on different ordinary occasions (benedictions of fields, cattle, houses etc.) emerged in the 10th–11th centuries. Written in Latin, they were quite extended by specification, application of apocryphal sources, so the prayers mixed up with incantations using elements of folk oral tradition. Thus, the Church, represented by parish priests, got involuntarily involved in the process of creating a language understandable to its flock, adopting elements of traditional culture. Benedictiones deviating from strict orthodoxy vanish only in 16th century with the spread of printed literature and unification of liturgic books.

Transcultural Approaches to the Bible: Exegesis and Historical Writing across Medieval Worlds ed. by Matthias M. Tischler and Patrick S. Marschner

Reviewed by: Transcultural Approaches to the Bible: Exegesis and Historical Writing across Medieval Worlds ed. by Matthias M. Tischler and Patrick S. Marschner Thomas A. Fudge Tischler, Matthias M., and Patrick S. Marschner, eds, Transcultural Approaches to the Bible: Exegesis and Historical Writing across Medieval Worlds (Transcultural Medieval Studies, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2021; pp. viii, 253; 19 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €80.00; ISBN 9782503592855. Few would question the assertion that the Bible ranks amongst the most important volumes in Western civilization. What has not been examined as thoroughly is the way in which Scripture has been utilized in creating and manipulating human memory, especially across transcultural medieval worlds. Naturally this is a large task that cannot be accomplished in a single thin volume. But this collection takes an initial step in that important direction. With a specific focus on the Iberian context, Latin Europe, the Near East, and the Baltic world, we are introduced to a series of vignettes drawing attention to the nature of Biblical interpretation and historical writing across these medieval worlds. Unsurprisingly, we learn the ways and means in which the Bible provides theological justification for crusading, explains how and why crusaders are God’s special people, provides an explanation for understanding the post-biblical nature of providential history, and how marginal glosses explain and correct the vagaries of Scripture, while at the same time elaborating how different cultures and events represent extensions of biblical narratives and truths. All of this is approachable and explicable by seeing beyond simplistic Sunday school notions of Scripture as a single text, reflecting a linear and unified programmatic agenda, possessing a priori metahistorical authority adopting modern assumptions like inspiration, verbal dictation, and theological politics creating the ‘word of God’. What is essential is understanding a complicated transmission process, a virtual lacuna surrounding canonization, and claims about authority that are often little more than the habit of repeated reading. As this volume makes clear, none of these components ever existed in an untouchable sacrosanctity. Cultures past and present, of course, have preferred to see the Bible as an instrument of unassailable power and authority. Many writings outside the biblical canon retained authority for communities of faith throughout the ages and informed efforts to frame concepts of salvation-history in the post-biblical world of the Middle Ages. Scripture was used, sometimes misused, occasionally abused, in a quest to explain history by adapting Iberian motifs, for example, to biblical narratives wherein typological connections between medieval and the Hebrew Bible worlds suggest prophecy, fulfilment, and justification for events, ideas, and practices. In this way, knowledge of the Bible plays a major part in interpreting contemporary affairs, thus enhancing the role Scripture plays in historical writing. Untangling these two discrete texts is difficult. [End Page 271] Knowledge of the Bible occurred aurally, optically, and dramaturgically, rather than through reading. Crusade narratives, for example, are peppered with Scriptural citations and allusions. The crusades become salvific, the Bible indispensable for crusaders, and we find arresting accounts of armies chanting hymns or psalms as the military machine advances in the name of God. Crusade texts are one example of how and why the Bible was quoted to provide credibility or justification. This volume underscores the role of historians toiling in the dimness of the medieval world, labouring to see mundane human efforts in the beam of divine light, interpreting human affairs with reference to the work of God, and setting forth these typologies in clearly enunciated exegesis. In consequence, contemporaries and posterity understand medieval matters in terms of the eternal now. Several chapters underscore the work of many medieval writers in identifying and applying the most appropriate biblical text for any number of respective contexts. Biblical manuscripts are utilized, by means of exegetical gymnastics if necessary, to illuminate divine approbation in the varied cultures of a world centuries removed from the sacred text. The more successful of such efforts resulted in medieval chronicles that are truly sustained dialogues with the Scriptures. Of particular interest is the dispute about clerical sexuality by means of an innovative use of Ezekiel 23, wherein we find absorbing elaboration of ‘condemned sisters, effeminate brothers, and damned heretics’ by Lydia M. Walker...

Pardonable Sodomy: Uncovering Laurence’s Sin and Recovering the Range of the Possible

This paper examines the 1405 pardon granted to a young married woman named Laurence who confessed to having had sex with another married woman in northern France. The pardon is unique in many respects. Most pardons are for men, and especially men who commit violent acts. This pardon defies all norms: it was granted to a woman, it seems to have been a pardon for consensual sex, and, finally, the sex was with another women. Given the focus of the narrative requesting royal grace, we have taken the position that this was likely a pardon for this sex, as a form of “sodomy,” an umbrella term for sex “against nature”, that is, non-reproductive, non-marital sex, though the pardon does not use the term (or any like it). Our inquiry, therefore, raises a number of critical questions. Most importantly is: why was there investigation, prosecution, and pardon? We seek to problematize every aspect of this problematically exceptional pardon. In so doing, we contribute to current scholarship in the field of queer medieval studies that calls for medievalists to shed their heteronormative lens when approaching complicated source documents that offer a window to us on medieval practices of and attitudes towards extra-marital sex.

Graiver, Inbar. Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism. Studies and Texts 213. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018. x+237 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

Graiver, Inbar. <i>Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism</i>. Studies and Texts 213. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018. x+237 pp. $80.00 (cloth).