Medieval Ways Research Articles

Inventing the Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1580s: early modern state formation or medieval patterns of expressing the power

ABSTRACT In 1581 King John III of Sweden added Grand Duke of Finland to his royal title. Traditionally, this has been seen as marking the Swedish army”s victories in the Swedish-Russian war, as challenging the power and rule of Grand Duke of Muscovy Ivan IV or explained in the context of early modern state formation. This article seeks to understand the logic of taking the title of grand duke as a continuum of medieval patterns of thought about princely power and rule. Ruling lands, vassals, and people were still very much connected with the ruler’s person and princely and dynastic powers understood in the medieval way. Princely titles played a crucial role in this game of – sometimes even overlapping – powers.

Talibov Tabrizi, Enlighten of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in the Modern Era

The purpose of writing this article is an analytical study of Talibov Tabrizi's Thoughts as one of the intellectuals supporting the Iranian people who is in the middle of the background of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the realization of this revolution (1284 AH) in Iranian society. He is one of the influential people in the realization of the Constitutional Revolution, to whom a part of the new ideas in the constitutional period Iran are dedicated. He was one of the pioneers of constitutionalist politics and is one of the first modern thinkers in Iran in the field of thought making. He has also brought aspects of cultural and political modernity to Iranian culture. His ideas and thoughts on cultural, social, political, and economic issues are in a Rupture from traditional science and education. New scientific topics and philosophical foundations of the modern world were the main foundations of his intellectual system. Based on what he learned from modernity, he commented on political issues and came up with new ideas on cultural, social and political issues. He is one of the promoters of natural sciences and modern social and political thought and the representative of the intellectual currents of his time, one of the followers of the originality of reason and experimental philosophy. A believer in philosophical liberalism, he generally rejects the medieval way of thinking and the political system associated with it. His political views are a combination of political liberalism and social democracy, and he seeks to establish a democratic system. Emphasizes the liberty right and the rule of law. He believes in the rule of the elite, that is, the people of knowledge and thought of the agents of reform and progress. It preaches national sovereignty and the right of nations to determine their own destiny.

Kesksed looduslikud pühapaigad Eesti kagunurgas

Differently from most of Estonia, in the south-easternmost peripheries of the country – in the western border areas of Setomaa, as well as in the eastern and southern borderlands of Võrumaa – it is possible to distinguish sacred sites of regional meaning, i.e. those where popular religious assemblies related to offering took place on holidays. In the Orthodox Seto culture area where medieval way of life survived until the 1920s, such sites are represented by the sacral complex of Miikse (offering stone, healing stream, cemetery hill, formerly also sacred oak and spring), St Anne’s stone (Annekivi) in Pelsi and Päevapööramise mägi (‘The Hill Where the Sun Turns’) in Hinniala village. Two major Orthodox religious centres of Setomaa have been founded on pre-Christian sacred sites. The church of Saatse was preceded by a sacred pine tree. On the site of the famous monastery of Pechory (Petseri) there was probably a large sacral complex of a sacred hill with a grove and cave, as well as a sacred spring and offering stone. The site of religious assemblies called Bohomola mägi (‘The hill of praying to God’) was located somewhere on the forested borderlands of the Lutheran province of Livonia and the Orthodox province of Pskov, being attended by peasants from both regions. In Lutheran areas where the modernization of culture started since the 1850s and 1860s already, folkloric evidence is fragmentary and has preserved more poorly. There sites of popular assemblies related to offering on holidays are known from Viitina Vana-mõisa, Villa, Viitka, Paidra, Kuutsi and Linte, and a sacred site of central importance was located also on God’s hill of Vana-Laitsna (presently Vēclaicene municipality in Latvia). Most of these the sites lie in the extreme peripheries of medieval parishes – the churches of Räpina, Vastseliina and Hargla were founded only in the 17th century The hinterlands of regional holiday assemblies probably correspond to regional identity units based of village groups called “corners” (nulk, kolk). Judging by the location of regional assembly sites of central meaning, their influence radius stretched until 6–10 kilometres. However, the system was not of symmetric character: some sites evidently had larger hinterlands than others and the hinterlands may also have been overlapped. The religious gatherings were often related to the solstices in the natural calendar or church holidays replacing them. Existing data give evidence of the intertwining of pre-Christian and Christian elements, especially in the Orthodox areas. In some cases the assembly tradition at sacred natural site has been transformed into local church holidays on the name days of the sanctuary. The strong and long-term preservation of tradition in some holy places of Setomaa results from their association with Christianity and pilgrimages inherent in popular Orthodoxy.

Introduction

Introduction

Villelmina Amaxia Viri sui Fredelici. Identification Strategies in Middle Age Piedmontese Rolls

Johannes filius Petri: this naming strategy represents one of the main medieval ways of designating people, especially in administrative documents of a fiscal nature. In fact, a person is certainly someone’s daughter or son and a woman is a man’s daughter or wife. Women, in particular, are often not even referred to by a first name but only as wives, daughters and mothers of males. In a 14th Century Turin (Northwestern Italy) judicial roll, alternative strategies have been identified and they not only indicate close family relationship, but also other medieval roles such as amasia. This paper inquiries the indirect denomination of this judicial source and compares the formulas used for men and women.

Тюрки в ранних арабских источниках: модусный анализ сочинения Ахмеда Ибн Фадлана о путешествии на Волгу

Introduction. The article examines the subjectivity in the representation of Turkic clans in ibn Fadlan’s famous memoirs devoted to the Arab mission trip undertaken from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgaria in early 10th c. Informed by the latest linguistic theories, the authors aim to analyze how the modus of his text, i.e. the meaning of the entire historical document, is influenced by the memoirist’s personality as a bearer of certain cultural characteristics and of specific religious beliefs, as well as by historical and everyday circumstances at the time the travelogue was written. Data and methods. Both the reconstructed Arabic original and available Russian translations and commentaries were used in a comparative mode. In addition, the authors considered the recent works of Arab scholars discussing the issue of discourse types of ibn Fadlan’s heritage in the context of the medieval Arab history and thinking. The article focuses on the prevailing themes and motifs in the text of the Arab traveler, when describing the social structures, traditions, and rituals of the Turkic ethnic groups he encountered (chiefly Oguzes), to identify the moduses (of condemnation, fear, surprise, admiration, etc.) through which these were realized, as well as the linguistic means of their expression that disturbed the neutral style of the story. The results of the analysis allow to draw a conclusion that the modus of the work was largely shaped by the medieval way of thinking and the world picture characteristic of the Arab-Muslim traveler, as well as by the official status of ibn Fadlan’s work at the court of the Abbasid Caliphate in its heyday. Also, the authors point out that there is a passage in the text that may be fictional, its morphology being largely of a fabulous character. Notably, attention should be drawn to ibn Fadlan’s attempts to find some possible commonalities between the civilizations, especially in the heavenly realm, and to promote an understanding between the peoples, even if neither cultural nor trade interaction between them existed at the time.

Bones, fire, and falcons: Loving things in medieval Europe

In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization of relics enabled a subversive, quasi-mystical counter tradition that located loving experiences within the unmediated physicality, or thingness, of Christian artifacts themselves. Moving next to Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), the article explores a curious case of self-negating devotion to fire. While contextualizing the saint's love against a background of scholastic materialism and ecstatic mysticism, it explores how fire gained a unique onto-theological status as the material essence of both love and the heavens in the 1200s. Finally, turning to love for animals, the analysis explores the astonishing care shown to falcons by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d.1250). While surveying a series of trends in medieval ways of loving creatures, the article stresses how the emperor's radical empathy for beasts allowed him temporarily to surrender his sovereignty, melding the interest of king and bird. Just like the mystical theology that underpinned much of medieval devotion, it argues, these three loving encounters were all essentially structured as self-annihilating journeys into a “oneness” with the material landscape. Considering the ongoing threads of this forgotten type of self-erasing love, these medieval encounters can have intriguing implications for debates in the environmental humanities today.

СВЕТЪТ НА МОНАХИНИТЕ ПО ЛЕКСИКАЛНИ ДАННИ / THE WORLD OF NUNS ACCORDING TO LEXICAL DATA

The article aims at comparing the data on female monasticism in two types of sources – hagiographic works and canon law – in order to bring forward monastic everyday life as an object of cultural conceptology and study of the diachronic linguistic picture of the world. Examples are taken from the Life of St. Eupraxia in the 1359–1360 copy of the Bdin Collection and selected rules from penitential collections. Everyday life in the monastery can be presented by means of distinct thematic areas defined by specific ranges of concepts (mental constructs) and the respective linguistic nominations. The lexical data addressed in the article refer to: food, clothing, education, labour, customs and regulations in the monastery, relations between nuns. The data on female monasticism in the Middle Ages are more limited than those available for monks. This corresponds with scarce information from other types of sources, such as iconographic and archaeological sources. The nuns’ habits and some positions in the monastery are denoted predominantly by masculine gender lexemes due to commonalities in the way of life and the moral norms. The comparison of lexical data from texts of different genres remains a promising task towards the reconstruction of the medieval way of life in the monastery.

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios

Reviewed by: Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios Robert Henke VISUAL EXPERIENCES IN CINQUECENTO THEATRICAL SPACES. By Javier Berzal de Dios. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019; pp. 216. Javier Berzal de Dios’s excellent Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces persuasively rebuts received narratives regarding Italian Renaissance theatre architecture and design, offering a more complex, nuanced picture that includes the heterogeneous, sometimes messy experiences of actual spectators. The standard view (only slightly exaggerated): Italian Renaissance theatre designers and scenographers, such as Baldassare Peruzzi in his decisive 1514 design for a production of La Calandria, rationalized their designs with the new art of linear perspective, which created the illusion of an ideal representation whose unity aligned with neo-Aristotelian notions of the dramaturgical unities. This single, unified picture was passively received by spectators functioning as a homogenous unit, except insofar as they were aesthetically and politically subordinate to the sovereign, who was positioned at the ideal perspectival point in the audience. This new, Renaissance view of seeing in the theatre decisively broke with medieval habits and shaped a linear progression of these tendencies running the course of the sixteenth century, from Peruzzi to Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century to the Teatro Olimpico and Teatro all’antica at Sabbioneta. The old humanist paradox obtains in this narrative as elsewhere: what seemed new was really a return to classical ideas. Berzal de Dios’s short but incisive book demolishes these received notions. In his account, theories of spatial unity were not in concert but actually clashed with humanist experimentation, the desire for non-orderly aesthetic effects such as wonder and the heterogeneous experiences of actual spectators conceived more as participants in civic dialogue than as cheerfully obedient ducal subjects. Neo-classical restraint, order, and symmetry were contradicted by impulses towards excess, surplus, and saturation. The ideal of a unified visual picture, governed by the cool laws of perspective, is belied by the displacements, truncations, and distortions revealed in the surviving stage representations of Rome, Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities. The author invites us to see Peruzzi’s iconic stage design for La Calandria, touted in traditional theatre histories as the epitome of the unified scenographic vision, as downright weird. The linear perspective located in the downstage part of the drawing tells only half the story, as Berzal de Dios examines the incongruities of what is illustrated on the backdrop, or flattened space in the background. There, the Colosseum is shrunk, and the Pantheon is sandwiched in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Linear perspective emerges not as the be-all and end-all, but merely “one of many tools, all of which were at the service of the artistic process” (15). Peruzzi’s Rome, too, is one of ruins and overgrown vegetation, hardly the ideal city abstracted from some versions of art history. To see such scenographers’ impulses to elicit wonder, surprise, and even religious awe is to contest the narrative that may have begun with artist and historian Giorgio Vasari, who in touting Peruzzi and others celebrated what he perceived as a rupture between Renaissance and medieval ways of thinking about the the stage. Berzal de Dios’s challenge to Vasari’s historiography helps us make more sense of Brunelleschi’s period-defying role in Italian theatre: the master of Renaissance perspective and engineering who designed wonder-inducing machinery for fifteenth-century religious plays (sacre rappresentazioni). Chapter 2, “The Artificial City on Stage,” examines designs by Beccafumi, Salviati, and others to show how designs for Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities were characterized by “spatial dissonances, visual tensions, inquietudes, and internal inconsistencies that demonstrate the prevalence of a taste for playfulness” (37). These were [End Page 111] the work of experimental artists who played with classical ideas—not theorists and mathematicians bound by the idée fixe of consistency. Cinquecento spectators did not see through a two-dimensional window as passive viewers to a three-dimensional perspettiva but were embroiled in what the author calls the “apparato”: the entire complex of the stage, the scenography, the auditorium, and the “spectators’ act of viewing as made possible and conditioned by the space” (5...

Diversity, Inclusion, and "Othering": Methodologies for Comparative Literature

Diversity, Inclusion, and "Othering":Methodologies for Comparative Literature Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay The Task of the Comparatist Comparative Literature has remained an elusive discipline of inquiry, as it has been perceived as "a subject of study, a general approach to literature, a series of specific methods of literary history, a return to a medieval way of thought, a methodological credo for the day, an administrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in university organization," and much more (Weisinger and Joyaux vii). Amidst these infinite possibilities, a comparatist must identify the key responsibilities of the discipline as a field of intellectual inquiry. The difficulty in defining the field, or at least the difficulty in coming to an agreement about the definition, is not essentially a crisis for the discipline. The field can and has accommodated the study of a wide range of literary works from varied geographical, historical, linguistic backgrounds, and engaged with other disciplinary modes of inquiry. Scholars have argued that the search for definition is ultimately a futile exercise for a field that resists categorization of knowledge into discipline-specific fields of inquiry. For example, Haun Saussy has shown that scholarly attempts in defining Comparative Literature "through its objects of knowledge or methods" remain inefficacious, and proposes to understand the discipline "as practice, a way of constructing objects" (340). Harry Levin, one of the founders of the discipline in the North American context, characterizes it as "an attempt to pool the resources of the variously related literature, to cross the linguistic barriers that confine them within the framework of national histories and provide an area for the consideration of their common features and underlying forces" (22). Levin's proposed attempt to transcend the boundaries of national histories in the study of literature has been echoed in the works of René Wellek, another founding figure of the American school of Comparative Literature, [End Page 180] who notes that "'Comparative' literature has become an established term for any study of literature transcending the limits of one national literature" (167). In the same essay, Wellek argued that it is entirely possible for single literature departments to engage in comparative studies of literature and proposed opening the study of literature beyond the association with a particular language; this approach would have eradicated the practice of dividing the teaching and scholarship of literature according to languages and instead embrace literature as a field of artistic expression and critical studies. An emphasis on the "literary" rather than the national and/or linguistic would have established literature as a unique cognitive entity driven by its own theories and methodologies; such an approach would have destabilized the monopoly of former colonial languages and their cultural empires could be forced to engage with other languages as equals. However, this approach has not been widely appreciated, and thus very few universities have merged their language-specific literature programs in order to create a "Literature" department. Paul de Man was aware of the challenge of self-identification that haunted the field, and in his 1967 "notebooks," he proposed that "comparative literature is an important auxiliary to the history of ideas, with obvious relevance for international studies" (230). This articulation of an "obvious" relationship between the fields of Comparative Literature and International Studies indicates the importance of locating Comparative Literature within a framework of internationalism and interdisciplinarity. Contemplating the discipline's definition and scope in early 1980s in "Comparative Literature as a Cultural Practice," Mary Louise Pratt welcomes the opportunity for Comparative Literature to work in "cooperation" with International Studies programs. Such endeavours promise to focus on the immediate cultural lives of the readers and students, allowing them to engage in intellectual inquiry about the world they inhabit. In the late 1980s, Earl Miner observed that "the least studied issue in comparative literature is what is meant by 'comparative' and […] what are the canons of comparability" (135). In the same essay, Miner elaborated that the "comparative" element in the study of literature allows us to understand how "critical systems" emerge by connecting the world, the poet/author, the poet/author's work, a text (the physical coding), a reader and the reader's perception of the poet/author's work. Rey Chow...

Pjesma jača od kamena? Natpis s jednog ili više kotorskih ciborija

Slova na kotorskim fragmentima posebnima čini obilje rupica izbušenih na njima i, rjeđe, polukružići koji lome haste na nekima od njih. Po tome se vrlo uvjerljivim činilo da ulomci pripadaju istom ciboriju. No niti su bridovi ploča rezani pod istim kutom niti su one sve iste debljine, što je teško zamisliti za dijelove istog komada namještaja. Nedavno pronađen prijepis natpisa govori pak u prilog mišljenju da je ipak riječ o jedinstvenom spomeniku. Tekst tvori zaokruženu misao, a ritam podupire takvo gledanje. Posrijedi je pjesma sastavljena od četiriju trohejskih osmeraca i dvaju sedmeraca, temeljena na srednjovjekovnom načinu ritmiziranja, na pravilnoj izmjeni naglašenih i nenaglašenih slogova. Stoga, ostaje zagonetno kako su se stihovi našli na nespojivim kamenim pločama. Novopronađeni prijepis natpisa uputio je na to da je nositelj imena Nikiforius bio biskup iz druge polovice 12. stoljeća. Andrija i drugovi najvjerojatnije su lokalni svetci, no ne čini se vjerojatnim da su stradali u sukobu Kotorana sa srpskim vladarom Nemanjom, jer je on bio politički zaštitnik biskupa Nikiforija u sporu s dubrovačkim metropolitom. Kako se kult Andrije i njegove braće nekako u to vrijeme uvodio u Dubrovniku zajedno s pričom da ih Kotorani nisu zaslužili, njihov izbor na kotorskom spomeniku mogao bi se gledati kao uzvratni udarac u sklopu neprihvaćanja neželjena dubrovačkog crkvenog vrhovništva.

Tropes of taste: The poetics of food and flavor in the Libro de Apolonio

Food in the Libro de Apolonio is not simply a function of the plot but rather an aspect of the poet’s rhetorical and poetic technique. Four interrelated deployments of food in the poem (portrayals of bread, gendered uses of food, food practices related to health, and additional feasting scenes), when compared to the Latin source text, highlight the mester de clerecía poet’s skill in adaptation. Bread in the poem has sacramental overtones and brings the Apolonio into relation with other more explicitly religious works of mester de clerecía poetry. Food is not gendered in typically medieval ways in the Libro de Apolonio, as the poet does not connect women to food preparation or service, but rather to its sacramental and medicinal aspects. The poet uses food in relation to health throughout the poem, but perhaps most significant is the episode of Tarsiana’s proposed medicinal cure of her father Apolonio. Finally, the scenes of feasting that the poet inherits from the Latin are stark in terms of their portrayal of foods, but the feasts that the poet adds out of his own invention are the most descriptive segments involving sustenance. These four aspects, along with other food-related uses, such as the synesthetic employment of flavor throughout the poem and inserted anecdotes and moralizing digressions involving edible substances, create a vision of food in the poem that goes beyond plot and into the realm of poetic technique and characterization.

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen

Reviewed by: Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen Emily Houlik-Ritchey ann marie rasmussen, ed., Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2019. Pp. 258. isbn: 978-0-268-10557-0. $60. Rivalrous Masculinities offers a stimulating collection of essays that advances the field's intellectual perspectives on medieval masculinities, sharpening our sense of the multiplicity of medieval masculinities as cultural constructions; their contingency upon social, geographic, and temporal forces; their intersectionality with other social modes of being in the medieval world; and above all, the necessity of our ongoing interrogation of gender, sexuality, and their presentation across disciplines in the medieval world. Rasmussen organizes this volume around 'three foundational claims':1) 'masculinity as a pluralized category'; 2) 'masculinity as an intersectional category of gender'; and 3) 'medieval ways of thinking about gender as being incommensurate with modern assumptions about sex and gender based in heteronormativity' (p. xiii). The Preface lays out ambitious claims, and while not all of the essays fully accomplish each of them, the triumph of the collection stems from each contribution's consistent analysis of multiple, competing iterations of medieval masculinities within a variety of temporal, geographic, generic, and linguistic contexts. Clare A. Lees opens the collection, usefully laying out a brief critical history of medieval masculinity studies in relation to medieval gender studies. Both Lees' essay, 'A Word to the Wise: Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities,' and Karma Lochrie's essay, 'Medieval Masculinities without Men,' emphasize a foundational insight: that gender, queer, and transgender studies have 'uncouple[d] masculinities, femininities, queer identities, and sexualities from what had come to look like a stable association between gender and the social, on the one hand, and (hetero) sexuality and embodiment, on the other' (Lees, p. 4). This uncoupling, as Lochrie [End Page 128] stresses, 'open[s] up the possibility—even the urgency—of our own consideration of the ways in which genders dissociated from sex might be produced' (pp. 209–10). Rivalrous Masculinities is at its strongest when its contributors thus dismantle and expose the assumption that masculinities are the natural province of biological males. The strongest essays within the collection proceed from these foundational insights, whether or not they lay them out as explicitly as Lees and Lochrie do. In this vein, the collection contains several intellectual gems that may be of particular interest to readers of Arthuriana. In the first section of the collection, 'Pluralizing Masculinity,' Lees argues that the Old English advice poem 'Precepts' offers 'a masculinity without subjectivity, whereby the constant repetition, or iteration, of the address to the "son"… lays bare the rhetorical structure of masculinity itself' (p. 18). In the stimulating essay 'Men in Trouble: Warrior Angst in Beowulf,' Gillian R. Overing analyzes the affective valences of 'specific formations of masculinity in Old English poetry,' arguing that Beowulf elucidates 'the concerns of the warrior elite to replicate itself, to create and control sameness, to ensure succession and maintain power' in the face of a troubling intersection of the heroic ethos with a clerical culture—a rivalrous intersection that creates 'an impossible quandary for the warrior male' (pp. 28, 37). In 'Predicaments of Piousness: The Trouble with Being a Learned Jewish Family Man in Premodern Europe,' Astrid Lembke analyzes two iterations of a popular Ashkenazic narrative pattern where a human man marries a demon woman, tracing models of masculinity that 'are thinkable in a community that does not offer a model of learned, clerical masculinity… based on abstaining from secular marriage' (pp. 58, 57). Because learned Jewish men had social and religious duties both to family and God, their models of masculinity sought to accommodate the tensions of these competing demands. In the second section of the collection, 'Intersectional Masculinity,' F. Regina Psaki insightfully analyzes an iteration of the medieval debate on the nature of women. In 'Misogyny, Philogyny, Masculinities: Antonio Pucci's Il Contrasto delle donne,' Psaki argues that Pucci 'evades or subverts' epistemological categories and rhetorical moves traditional to medieval misogyny and philogyny texts (p. 105). In so doing, Pucci's contribution to the medieval debate on the nature of women becomes 'a debate on...

Stan wyjątkowy i stan bez nazwy w myśli Carla Schmitta. Propozycja rozdzielenia

The concept of a state of emergency is one of the most frequently cited elements of the thought of the German philosopher of the law and political theorist Carl Schmitt. In its discussions, however, the conceptualization of the state of emergency, which Schmitt proposed in 1924 in his juridical comments on Article 48 of the Weimar Republic’s constitution, is often linked with the theory of Ausnahmezustand from Political Theology (1922). Such a juxtaposition is a mistake, because Schmitt was not a consistent thinker and his texts can be mutually contradictory. I propose, therefore, to separate the state of emergency from Ausnahmezustand – translated from German literally as a state without a name. The main difference between them consists in the different types of legitimacy. The state of emergency from the Constitution of the Weimar Republic finds its legitimacy in this document from 1919, however, read by Schmitt in a way that in his Constitutional Theory (1928) he referred to as relativization of the constitution. For the state without a name, as not being included in the legal order and the equivalent of a miracle in theology, such legitimacy is impossible. In order to find it, one must refer to other Schmitt’s works than the strictly judicial ones. I believe that the state without a name may be legally valid – in a word: not a coup d’état – if we acknowledge that Schmitt’s political theology is not just a methodological project that translates theological notions into political and legal ones, but a wider proposal rooted in the faith in Revelation. Therefore, this figure from the work of the German thinker in which the state of emergency finds its legitimacy is taken from St. Paul’s letters; it is the figure of a katechon: the one who comes and stops the world from disintegration. The use of such legitimacy emphasizes the reluctance to accept modernity, which Schmitt did exhibit, and presents him as a thinker who continued the medieval way of thinking, which is completely incompatible with the strictly modern concept of a state of emergency.

Skryptoria klasztorne i średniowieczne ustawodawstwo cysterskie o książce

The oldest book which was on the territory of the early Piast in the second half of the tenth century derived, comes from the Benedictine scriptoria from the area of Bavaria, Saxony, Rhineland and Lorraine and contained the biblical texts and established liturgical canon necessary for the celebration of the Mass. Preserved from the twelfth century regulations of Cistercian chapters which decided that in each monastery there should be: missal, epistolary, Gospel Book, gradual, antiphonary, liber hymnarius, psaltery, lectionary and calendar. These regulations made the copywriter’s work particularly important. The importance attributed to their work is attested to, for example, by their release by the General Chapter of the Order from other dutiesin favor of the monastery, and by the permission in some cases to work at night. In Cistercian scriptoria apart from copying of the liturgical texts, the memorials so-called libri virorum et mortuorum, there were preparing documents for the current administrative and economic work of the monastery; in addition there were writing yearbooks, obituaries, monastery chronicles or epitaphs poem. There were recording notes of daily life outside the walls of the enclosure,names and functions of friars particularly events that took place away from the monastery or notes about elementary disasters happening in the proximate areas, the damages of monastery caused by floods, fires or epidemics. The preserved manuscript codes are an priceless source for learning the minds, interpersonal relationships prevailing in the small communities, their relations with their nearest surrounding and medieval way of seeing the world.

Women and Water: Icelandic Tales and Anglo-Saxon Moorings

This collaborative article offers a multidisciplinary dialogue about modern and medieval ways of knowing and understanding water as place and process—as source and resource—and in so doing, explores and unsettles habitual disciplinary associations of place with specific times, identities, and genders. It brings together medieval and modern ideas about water, women, and the monstrous in art, popular culture, poetry, and learned texts to demonstrate how the subject of water connects different times, places, and media. Beginning in modern Iceland, the essay moves through Icelandic and early medieval British tales of the watery, the fishy, and the female, using the work of contemporary American artist Roni Horn, known for her work on place, identity, and Iceland, to focus this criss-crossing of temporalities, cultures, and places.

Ablass und Reformation. Erstaunliche Kohärenzen by Berndt Hamm

Reviewed by: Ablass und Reformation. Erstaunliche Kohärenzen by Berndt Hamm Robert Kolb Ablass und Reformation. Erstaunliche Kohärenzen. By Berndt Hamm. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. xvii + 281 pp. Hamm harvests fruits from his half century of research in the history of late medieval German piety to produce a most helpful collection of evidence that explains the intentions of the church in propagating the popular theory of indulgences in the world of Luther's youth and early career as university instructor. Hamm proposes that "in the two centuries before the Reformation the dynamic of an increasingly expanding theology of grace, a piety based on mercy, and a religion of comfort laid an ever-stronger weight on the freely given, protective goodness of God. Within the dynamic of the reinforcement of these ideas, which were then taken up and radicalized by the Reformation, the proclamation of indulgences and jubilees formed an important strand along with other remarkable forces that advanced the message of grace and the gospel" (9). Within the coordinates of late medieval theology, piety, and the authority of the church there took place "a final intensification, a maximizing of grace and the forgiveness of sins, to which Luther responded in a surprisingly different manner to place great worth on divine mercy and maximize it" (10). Hamm qualifies his striving to highlight the "coherence" between the ever cheaper grace of the indulgence preachers, however, by noting that "the continuation of the late medieval transformation in the same direction of modification is to be noted [in Luther] but it is bound up with a noteworthy qualitative leap" (12). Hamm traces the development of this ever-easier access to the grace and forgiveness that was attainable through indulgences and similar means which the pope and, under his direction, the clergy had to dispense. His study focuses on the concessions granted by the church's opening an ever-wider portal to the winning of grace, which the indulgence commissioner Raimund Peraudi developed around 1500. This helps readers grasp both the theoretical framework for the church's easing requirements for gaining assurance through a minimal contribution of religious commitment and the perception of officials such as Peraudi of the need for meeting the [End Page 218] pastoral catastrophe such requirements engendered. Hamm's years of engagement with the thought of Peraudi's assistant, Johannes von Paltz, provide specific details of the system which Luther encountered since both Luther and Paltz resided in the Augustinian Eremite cloister in Erfurt (85–98). It is unfortunate that Luther never mentioned Paltz since he seems to have been a potential vital link between popular pious culture and Luther in his early years as a monk. At the end of the book Hamm summarizes his findings: the striving of Peraudi, Paltz, and others to provide good pastoral care within the presuppositions of grace dispensed to those who had fulfilled at least minimal sacred activity through some element of the hierarchical structures of the time produced attempts to assure those who purchased indulgences of 1) total grace and complete forgiveness of sins, 2) good pastoral care, 3) the nearness of grace, 4) the lifting of the burdens of the sinner, 5) the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, 6) certainty of salvation (pp. 233–250). Hamm's research provides those interested in the texture of Luther's pastoral address to the problems he encountered in this system with detailed analysis of the theological reasoning behind the ever easier access to grace being developed at Luther's time. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the "coherence" or "continuity" that must be recognized between the medieval way of thinking and Luther's theology is better seen as a decisive break with the system that had indeed posed the questions and provided the concepts with which Luther tendered a radically new way of thinking. Hamm sometimes grants this point but too often obscures it with his desire, proper as a corrective, to show readers that Luther grew up surrounded by the raw material for his radically new design for defining being Christian. However, Copernicus did not go beyond the efforts of his contemporary astronomers Georg von Peuerbach and Johannes Regiomontanus, who were refining Ptolemy...

A Medieval Way to Modernity: Wilhelm R. Valentiner, Late Medieval Sculpture and German Expressionism

This article traces how Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880–1958) studied, approached and criticised late medieval Italian sculpture and German Expressionism, from the turn of the twentieth century until the eve of World War II. It explores Valentiner's theoretical positions through a thorough analysis of his writings and biography, from his time as curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1908–1914), through his World War I years in Germany (1914–1923), and, finally, to his second period in the United States (1923–1935). For Valentiner, late medieval Italian sculpture and German Expressionism were linked by similar and comparable formal qualities. In his writings Valentiner created a bidirectional dialogue between past and present. He interpreted the stylistic characteristics of late medieval sculpture by referring to Expressionist formal simplifications; but he also elevated Expressionism as a pure modern form of art, by creating a “tradition” for it, and interpreting it as the final step of an artistic lineage that had begun in the late Middle Ages.

When the World is Not Enough: Medieval Ways to Deal with the Lack of Referents

According to several late medieval logicians, the use the universal quantifier ‘omnis’ creates the requirement that the sentence refers to at least three items—the principle of sufficientia appellatorum. The commitment is such that, when the quota is not fulfilled, one has to import the missing items from the realm of the nonexistent. While the central argument for this principle, whose origin is Aristotle’s De Caelo, stems from the contrast between unrestricted universal quantifiers and binary quantifiers, the discussion is often mixed with another issue, concerning the requirement of a plurality of referents for universals. In this paper, we try to distinguish those different issues and map the reactions of xiiith authors to the principle of sufficientia appellatorum.

Bukolische Dichtung und Kirchenkritik. Die 9. Ekloge von Baptista Mantuanus

In the present paper I intend to give a survey on the chronological problems of the Eclogues by Baptista Mantuanus, on their historical background, on the activity of the popes during the lifetime of Baptista, on his career in the church that gives the grounds for his sharp criticism on the moral of the popes as well as of the church. After surveying these problems I focus on the most critical 9th Eclogue by Baptista examining the Virgilian parallels and allusions, the structure of the Eclogue and the mutual influence of the medieval and humanistic way of thinking in the poem showing Virgilian and Hildebertian intertextuality, with the conclusion that humanistic and theological traditions are unified in the poem.