Medieval World Research Articles

Gillian Adler, Chaucer and the Ethics of Time. New Century Chaucer. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2022, pp. 230.

Gillian Adler (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles), Assistant Professor and Esther Raushenbush Chair in Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College, has written a literary and philosophical study of time in the works of Chaucer. She argues that “Chaucer employs not only discourses of time, but also the temporality of poetic form to explore the ethics of time” (16). Thus, she examines the relation between Chaucer’s form and content with a focus on temporal themes. Her book draws on scholarly studies of time in medieval literature, such as Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (1983) by Richard Sorabji, Time in the Medieval World (2001) edited by Chris Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod, and Taking our Time: Reconsidering Gender, Time, and Memory in Medieval Culture, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani (2015) as well as shorter studies.

Mundos em tradução: breves apontamentos sobre historiografia universal em línguas vulgares

Reflecting on the permanence and longevity of universal chronicles throughout the Middle Ages, a brief reflection is presented on the genre and its diffusion. Associated with the double transmission of biblical and ancient material in medieval Europe, these chronicles are excellent vehicles for imperial, royal or other governing argumentations. Thus, the multifaceted character of medieval world history translations is evaluated: the linguistic translation, with the passage from Latin to vernacularlanguages, and the political translation, which co-opts the history of the world for different political and ideological argumentations.

Pro anacorita —Identifying Individuality in London’s Anchorites, 1200–1550

Anchorites, Christian recluses who lived in cells typically attached to the sides of ecclesiastical structures, were a fixture of ascetic religious life in medieval Northwestern Europe, especially England. However, despite anchorites’ prominent place in Christian society throughout the Middle Ages, they have been markedly understudied by historians. This project, which focuses on the anchorites found within the bounds of the City of London—that is, the area of London largely surrounded by the Roman wall—addresses this lacuna by establishing what can be known about individual anchorites in London from 1200–1550 and exploring how London’s parish geography factored into the roles and lives of anchorites. Through rhetorical analysis of lay/merchant wills, anchorite wills, royal decrees and bequests, Church approvals of enclosures, and Henry VIII’s Chantry Certificates, this study will illuminate the unique religiosity of the medieval world of recluses, as well as attempt to give anchorites, especially female anchorites, something rarely afforded to them—treatment as individuals.

О ВЛИЯНИИ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОГО НАСЛЕДИЯ НА СОВРЕМЕННЫЕ ИНДО-БРИТАНСКИЕ ОТНОШЕНИЯ

Today, India pursues a multi-vector foreign policy, maintaining its strategic autonomy and being one of the most important civilizational states in the world. At the same time, India is the object of foreign policy efforts of all leading players, including the UK, its former metropole. In this article, the author examines how London is trying to rely on cooperation with New Delhi to compensate for its withdrawal from the EU and, with India’s help, to forge a new role for itself in a changing world. However, despite the long diplomatic courting, problems of interpretation of the colonial period and issues of shared history remain a serious stumbling block in the bilateral relationship. The nostalgia over the imperial past has been fueling the excessive ambitions of the British politicians. In the author’s view, due to an overly positive attitude towards their imperial past, the British politicians, over-exaggerating their own importance, constantly underestimate the extent to which the world distrusts Britain. For the people of India, it is India that is at the centre of global processes today, and their country’s influence on everything that happens in the world is undeniable. India at the time of the British arrival was not only one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, but also a pearl of the medieval world with developed culture, architecture, art and literature, unique industries. From the first to the eleventh century AD, the Indian economy was the largest in the world. During 200 years of colonialism, India and Britain almost swapped places in terms of their GDP share in the world economy. Therefore, for Indians, the rapid growth of their country’s economy in the early 21st century is not a miracle, but merely a restoration of the old balance of power in the world, where India and China have been leaders for centuries. It is also symbolic that the post of the British Prime Minister in 2022 was taken by a politician of Indian descent. The author concludes that, having celebrated 75 years of Independence, India is looking to the future with justified optimism, while its former metropole is in a constant search for ways to restore its depleted power, again seeing special relations with India as one of its desired instruments

Arsenali marittimi e città portuali del Mediterraneo medievale. Gli arsenali di Napoli, metropoli portuale del Trecento

Study of medieval Naples’s urban fabric through material remains, primary documents, early cartography, and cityscapes sheds light on a central element of the city’s port: its arsenali (dockyards). This article places the royal arsenali of the Angevin period (1266-1444) in the larger urban context of the city’s port infrastructure, presenting what sources reveal about their location, history, and form. In doing so, it relates them to surviving examples of arsenali in Amalfi, Alanya, Candia, and Valencia. Understanding the infrastructures of the Angevin port of Naples positions the city as a major center of the medieval world, while also raising broader questions about the Neapolitan port’s relationship to other Mediterranean examples.

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley

Reviewed by: Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley Stephen Harris mary kate hurley, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 226. isbn: 978-0-8142-1471-8. $99.95. A challenge faced by any book on a broad theme like translation is to quarry a small number of texts for something widely applicable. The challenge is made more difficult if one's aim is to reveal 'community,' which has to be abstracted from dozens of familial, tribal, ethnic, legal, religious, and linguistic groupings across centuries, evinced (in Britain) in at least four languages, and encrypted within conventions of genre. The challenge seems to me insurmountable except as a thought-experiment, itself much complicated by addressing readers who entertain modern prejudices, expectations, and unfamiliarity with source material. In that view, Translation Effects is an instructive thought experiment. Mary Kate Hurley interprets a variety of medieval translations in order to propose their 'imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities' (p. 1). These imagined communities are the 'translation effects' of her title. Hurley's first chapter discusses the Old English (OE) translation of Paulus Orosius' History Against the Pagans, written in Latin. Hurley focuses on a handful of instances when the OE translator writes, 'Orosius said.' This phrase, Hurley claims, 'constructs an audience located in two distinct times: the fifth-century Roman world … and the ninth-century Old English-speaking world' (p. 27). A subtle effect on a reader of the OE Orosius, this trans-temporal community exemplifies Hurley's 'translation effect.' The second chapter concerns the Catholic abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, who around the year 1000 recorded a set of saints' lives in OE. By translating some local lives from Latin, especially that of Saint Oswald, King of England, Ælfric creates a 'protonationalist' tradition around which an Anglo-Saxon community can form (p. 70). In Chapter Three, Hurley adopts a trope from Christine Schott: the 'community of the page,' which comprises readers, scribes, and glossators of a manuscript. The post-Conquest glossator known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester returned often to a manuscript and therefore had a 'multitemporal relationship' to it (p. 98). In another manuscript, an illustrator has marked Latin phrases with red ink, while another marked OE sentences with red ink, thereby indicating 'the multilinguality of the text' (p. 102). Scribes are aware of translations and have methods to help future readers (p. 108). Thus, the manuscript invites readers who are multilingual and who can add information to what they find there. Chapter Four concerns the story of Constance as retold by Nicholas Trevet, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The three authors are 'united by their temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense of "Engelond"' (p. 128). My knowledge of these authors is too limited to be able to assess the success of Hurley's argument. The last chapter concerns Beowulf. In it, Hurley explores moments in the poem 'in which the process of community formation and dissolution is worked out through the telling and retelling of stories' (p. 154). It is a terrific meditation on how the poem portrays the vicissitudes of human community. This chapter reveals a critic who has thought deeply and well about this poem. [End Page 152] Hurley contributes to a scholarly conversation about English identity that focuses on idealized communities as a source of political and social aspiration. For decades scholars have tried to isolate sources of ethnic and national identity in the early medieval world and to weigh both their credibility and their effects. A common assumption in this conversation is that stories, especially historical ones, bore a 'kernel of identity' (in Herwig Wolfram's phrase) around which communities could—but not necessarily did—form. Readers can entertain ideas they never act on. And stories of identity are always provisional, a point Hurley illustrates extremely well in her final chapter. The contributing role of stories to a shared potential identity opened the door to literary critics. Critics, this reviewer among them, mined literary texts for ideals of community. I'm not sure that the effort yielded much that was useful to...

The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Paul M. Dover

We have become accustomed to the idea that we live in the “information age,” the result of an “information revolution.” Nonetheless, some have argued that every society and age has been centered around information. Dover questions both these standpoints by placing the “information revolution” in Early Modern Europe. Drawing from his admirable research about diplomacy in the Early Modern Era, he examines Europe, not simply for the purpose of comparison but rather to explore the developing interdependence of European countries. Aided by an impressive array of primary sources, Dover traces the development of Europe as a social, political, and fundamentally informational network. The book also uses numerous secondary sources in multiple languages to reveal another network, historical scholarship, which has, in recent years, like his subject, developed around information.Patterning history and combining scholarship, the book makes “information” a critical tool for understanding the Early Modern Era. Rather than fighting against accounts of the present as the information era, Dover suggests that the current age began in the Early Modern Period. He concludes that today’s transitions, particularly the decline of paper and print and the rise of orality, may be marking the end of that long “age” and the return to something analogous to the pre-paper medieval world. Hence, Dover suggests, understanding the past will help us to understand the present better, in the process reminding us of the often-overlooked etymology of revolution.In mapping these revolutions, Dover avoids simple notions of determinism. He consults Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Change but acknowledges criticism of the determinism that she acquired from Marshall McLuhan.1 Although Dover portrays technology as a central factor, he insists that technology not only shaped but was also shaped by its social context, thereby revealing the recursive aspects of our need for information. Tools that people developed to mine, order, and store information also expanded, often dramatically, the informational landscape, which required still more tools, which further expanded the landscape, or, as Dover frequently calls it (following Desiderius Erasmus), the copia. The “worlds of paper,” in the opening chapter, provided access to information, resulting in a deluge of new devices and practices—including print, accounting, science, and communications systems, such as the post office—that ignited similarly explosive cycles.Dover’s powerful account offers a broad and intriguingly unifying analysis of Early Modern Europe as well as an incentive for research farther afield. After all, as Dover acknowledges, the origins of paper, print, and accounting were not European. Just as Dover juxtaposes past and present, drawing comparisons based on a similar analytical (in this case, informational) lens between Europe and elsewhere should also reap rewards. But as we deploy that lens, it will also be useful to subject it to analysis. A quick scan of Dover’s bibliography indicates how information has become a keyword for contemporary history. Eisenstein’s 1979 book deploys the term 50 times in 800 pages; Dover’s does the same in the first 8 pages. Between the two, the field of history seems to have undergone its own “information revolution.”Yet, central though it may be to many contemporary studies, analysis of the concept of “information” is rare in histories, which are also not always consistent in their use. Dover sometimes elides it with and sometimes distinguishes it from “data,” “facts,” “news,” “gossip,” “observation,” “knowledge,” and “wisdom,” all of which are assumed to proliferate on paper. Dover explores the concept via metaphors of distilling, cooking, aggregation, production, commodification, abstraction, distinction, and morselization. Sometimes information seems autonomous, independent of both medium and source, and sometimes it is dependent on one or both of them. It is regularly subject to quantification, though never precisely counted. Trying to present a unified picture of information is a challenge that stretches across multiple disciplines, often as members of those disciplines pursue interdisciplinary coherence. But such coherence may never be found unless each discipline more explicitly analyzes its own assumptions.

:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

Intimate Estrangements: Talking about Love and the Self in Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe

This article addresses the adaptation of the medieval devotional work, The Book of Margery Kempe (1438), in Robert Glück’s New Narrative novel Margery Kempe (1994). Speaking as the character “Bob”, Glück retells Margery’s mystical experiences and desires in a blend of modern prose, Middle English, and Medieval Latin. I argue that this mixed form fosters an intimate but disruptive reading experience that estranges Kempe’s medieval world from modern readers; in turn, Glück poses the limits of talking about love and the self in writing. I begin by tracing the formal choices made in Barry Windeatt’s modern English translation of Kempe’s Book that Glück used, before describing the mixing of historical and modern languages in his retelling of Kempe’s life. I conclude that the recent republication of Glück’s novel (2020) proves its continued relevance, as it raises the queer possibilities of translation and adaptation for us today.

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.

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

(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.&#x0D; 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.&#x0D; 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.&#x0D; 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.&#x0D; 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.

Centering Medieval Africa: Guidelines and Resources for Non-Specialist Educators

In this article I argue for the importance of centering medieval African in both secondary and post- secondary settings and offer some concrete resources and guidelines for doing so, especially for non- specialists. In my teaching context––high school students in the United States between ages 15 and 17––many state standards emphasize African history during and after European colonialism. Overlooking Africa’s medieval past maintains colonial historical narratives that depict Africa as a region without history. Instead, by choosing discrete sources and cultures to teach, maximizing the global aspect of medieval African trade and cultural networks, and adapting these approaches for their specific classroom needs, educators can emphasize a story of African history that appropriately situates African societies as part of the medieval world’s constellation of cultural and power centers.

Medieval and early modern diets in the Polack region of Belarus: A stable isotope perspective.

In western and north-western Europe there has been a growing focus on exploring how major economic, political, and social changes during the Medieval period impacted the lived experience of different populations and sectors of society. Stable isotope analysis has proven particularly powerful in this regard, providing direct insights into the long-term diets of individuals and communities. Despite experiencing similarly dramatic social reconfigurations and changes, eastern Europe has, however, received far less attention in this regard. The territory of Belarus has, especially, so far remained a relative blank spot on the bioarchaeological map of Europe, though cities such as Polack emerged rapidly as key nodes within a growing economic and religious network. To gain direct insight into the diets of inhabitants of the Polack region of Belarus in the 11-18th centuries, we applied stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to bone and dentine collagen from human (n = 143) and animal (n = 105) individuals from the city of Polack and surrounding rural sites. Results indicate a diet based on C3 terrestrial resources, which did not differ between sexes and showed limited variation over time. Contrary to expectations, it appears that animal products were commonly consumed by rural dwellers, but no significant reliance on fish resources or millet consumption is found. In contrast to examples from western Europe, we argue that the diets in the city and the surrounding villages remained broadly similar for the majority of the population, and similar to commoners analysed in Poland and Lithuania, perhaps suggestive of slightly different economic changes operating in this part of the Medieval world.

Post-Conquest Forged Charters Containing English: A List

The paper presents a list of sixty-nine forged charters containing English pro- duced following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The list can be considered a supplement to The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1066–1220 (Da Rold et al. 2010) – a project conducted jointly at the University of Leeds and University of Leicester collecting all known texts containing English, in order to provide an insight and allow research into “transitional”, post-Conquest English. The paper outlines the significance of charters in the Medieval world, and discusses some key issues and misconceptions related to study- ing this period in the history of the English language.

The Making and Breaking of Kinetic Empire: Mobility, Communication and Political Change in the Eastern Mediterranean, c. 900–1100 CE

AbstractThis paper applies the concept of ‘kinetic empire’ to the eastern Mediterranean world in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The term ‘kinetic empire’ is borrowed from Hämäläinen's analysis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north American Comanche Empire. It refers to the way in which trans- and supra-regional power could be created, expressed and enforced through mobile means. The article focuses primarily on the role of mobility in the expansion of the Byzantine Empire between c. 900 and 1050, but also makes comparison with the contemporaneous Fatimid caliphate and other regional polities which we might usually regard as sedentary states. Recovering the role of the kinetic not only extends our understanding of the modalities of power in this crucial region of the medieval world, it also allows us to question the nature and degree of transformation wrought by mobile newcomers, such as Normans, crusaders and Turks in the later decades of the eleventh century. In this sense of developing and exploring concepts useful for the study of the transregional in premodernity and questioning standard periodisations, this article is also a practical exercise in medieval global history.

Ryder Patzuk-Russell, The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland. (The Northern Medieval World.) Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2021

Article Ryder Patzuk-Russell, The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland. (The Northern Medieval World.) Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2021 was published on August 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 1).

Ortaçağ Siyaset Teorisinin Kaynakları ve Ortaçağ Politikası ile Bağlantısı

Yüzyıllarca süren ciddi bir tarihsel çalışmanın ardından, günümüzde eğitimli insanların bile büyük çoğunluğunun hala Orta Çağ’ı, insanların tuhaf ve fantastik anlayışlarla yönetildiği bir dönem olarak gördüğünü söylemek muhtemelen doğru olacaktır. Orta Çağ hakkında gerçek bilgi arayışının daha çok Rönesans ve Yeni Öğrenme’nin aptal ve cahil belirsizliğiyle mi yoksa Romantik hareketin anlamsız coşkusuyla mı engellendiği gerçek bir şüphe konusudur. Rönesans, ortaçağ uygarlığını basitçe barbar ve irrasyonel olarak ele alırken, Romantik hareket ise, on dördüncü ve on beşinci yüzyıllarda grotesk şövalyelik düzenleriyle ilk Gotik canlanmanın gülünç oyununu gerçek ortaçağ dünyasıymış gibi algıladı. Hiç şüphesiz, ortaçağ yaşamının uygulanamaz bulunan ve modern dünya uygarlığının gerçek gelişimi ile uyumlu hale getirilemeyecek yönlerine her zaman gereken ağırlığı vermek zorunda kalacağız ancak bunların aşırı vurgulandığına ve bizlerin Orta Çağ’ın bazı uygulanamaz fikirlerini, çağın arkasındaki gerçek ve yönetici ilkelerle karıştırma eğiliminde olduğumuza inanıyorum.

Inverse Trajectories: Elite Music and Dance in the Medieval Mediterranean World (ca. 400–1400)

ABSTRACT Despite some interchange between the two shores of the medieval Mediterranean world, particularly in Sicily and Iberia after about 1000 CE, one may distinguish differences in between the enjoyment of secular music between Christian upper classes and Islamic upper classes on the shores of the sea in this era. Where the Islamic world is concerned, a distinction may be drawn between an initially more sophisticated east, including Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, and especially Iraq, which inherited much from the Persian and Byzantine musical heritage and from Greek philosophy of music, and a culturally remote west (North Africa and Iberia) that received some impetus from the east and only later developed its own distinctive forms. The early history of these arts in the Christian lands is more obscure but comes into sharper focus after about 1200. The two histories can be seen as almost exactly the inverse of one another, as cultural and religious discourses produced quite different attitudes toward both music and dance.