Mid-thirteenth Century Research Articles

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Daoists, the Imperial Cult of Sage-Kings, and Mongol Rule

Abstract This article demonstrates the central position that Daoists occupied in the representations of state power in north China under Mongol rule. In the mid-thirteenth century, Daoist Master Jiang Shanxin and his disciples, under Khubilai Khan’s patronage, actively rebuilt several temples of Confucian sage-kings in southern Shanxi province. Jiang Shanxin’s lineage was a product of dynamic interactions between the Mongol conquerors and local Chinese Daoists in which the two found common ground in sage-kings worship that had served to strengthen imperial legitimacy in previous dynasties. The strong Mongol-Daoist alliance in reordering the empire’s ritual space resulted in not just the revival of but also the creation of new ritual precedents for the Chinese imperial cult of sage-kings.

Die Ausmalungen der Wiener Virgilkapelle. Die visuelle Kultur in Byzanz, im Kaukasus, in Syrien und Nordmesopotamien

This case study of the aniconic wall paintings – red-colored, monumental crosses from the mid-thirteenth century – in Vienna’s subterranean Chapel of St. Virgil demonstrates that, in the absence of written sources, artifacts can serve as historical documents. The article offers an alternative approach to the quest for historical context, exploring transcultural, cross-media, and diachronic visual comparisons. Since late antiquity, cross decorations with surrounding zigzag patterns were common in Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Georgia. Formal parallels survive on the facade of the Armenian basilica of Ereruk and among the many red-colored paintings in the cave churches of Cappadocia. Brick ornaments with crosses in blind arches from the eleventh through the fourteenth century offer the most striking visual correspondences to St. Virgil. Compelling examples can be seen on the facades of the eleventh- and thirteenth-century churches of Nea Moni and the Panagia Sikelia on Chios and on the fourteenth-century facade of the Orhan Gazi Camii in Bursa. The paintings of the Viennese chapel are thus likely to refer to the ornate brick facades of Middle Byzantine architecture.

A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia ed. by Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz

Reviewed by: A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia ed. by Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz John N. Miksic (bio) Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, ed. A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2020. 234+ pp. This book describes a search for a fourteenth-century palace in highland West Sumatra. Ancient palaces in Southeast Asia are elusive targets. They were imposing structures, but consisted mostly of wood and were vulnerable to fire, rot, and other forms of decay. At most, we may hope to find their ghosts in the form of soil discolorations (postholes), which are the remains of decayed wooden pillars that once supported such palaces. We are often forced to reconstruct them from written sources, which may be interpreted in different ways, or from artifacts supposedly left behind by palace dwellers. The volume under review describes the excavation of two historic sites and one prehistoric site at the southern edge of the Tanah Datar valley in 2011, 2012, and 2014 by a team of German, French, and Indonesian archaeologists. Those sites are at Bukit Gombak, Bukit Kincir, and Tanah Lua (in the Saruaso area on the north side of the Selo River). I have known Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz (editor and co-author of this report) and Dominik Bonatz (contributor) since 2003. I co-edited a book with them based on a conference held in Berlin in 2004 that assembled a large group of specialists on highland Sumatran anthropology, history, and archaeology.1 Tjoa-Bonatz kindly notes that my hypothesis that Bukit Gombak was the probable site of a fourteenth-century royal capital partially inspired the research described in this book (3).2 Moreover, I visited the site in 2012 when the excavation described in this book was in progress, I received an acknowledgement in the preface to this book (xxiii), and I am frequently acknowledged in the footnotes. Thus, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer. What I can do is comment on the significance of this research from my viewpoint as a specialist in the historical archaeology of Sumatra, and to illustrate the importance of this study of highland Sumatra for Southeast Asian studies. One of the first English descriptions of the Luak nan Tigo, or “Three Valleys” of the Minangkabau, was written by Sir T.S. Raffles in 1818 when he was governor of Bengkulu (Bencoolen), southwest Sumatra. He was aware of the court’s prestige among the Malay [End Page 111] kingdoms of Sumatra and was impressed by the dense population in the Pagarruyung area, which he estimated at a million people.3 In 1275 the east Javanese kingdom of Singasari imposed suzerainty over the Sumatran kingdom of Malayu Dharmaśraya. In the eleventh through twelfth centuries the capital of Malayu was probably in the lower Batanghari, but by the mid-thirteenth century it had moved a hundred miles upstream. The location of the king’s palace in the late-thirteenth century is marked by the base of a statue of a Buddhist deity found at Padang Roco (“Field of Statues”), on which a text was inscribed in 1286 stating that the statue had been brought from Java and erected at Dharmaśraya by Maharaja Kertanagara of Singhasari. Brick sanctuaries showing evidence of several phases of construction together with Chinese ceramics distributed along a seven-kilometer-long stretch of riverbank indicate that the area was inhabited between around 1250 and 1350.4 The precise location of the palace has not yet been established. One of the few people who left a substantial written record in Classical Southeast Asia lived in highland West Sumatra during the fourteenth century: Adityavarman. His biography can be reconstructed from inscriptions in Java and Sumatra, secondary sources, and chronicles.5 He was born in east Java, his mother may have been a Sumatran princess, and he may have gone to China on a diplomatic expedition in 1325. An inscription records that he sponsored work on a temple in east Java in 1343. He may have been deputed to Dharmaśraya as a viceroy of Majapahit in 1347. A Javanese poem written in 1365, Deśavarnana, listed...

Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages ed. by Rory Naismith

Reviewed by: Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages ed. by Rory Naismith Judy Bailey Naismith, Rory, ed, Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages (Reading Medieval Sources, 1), Leiden, Brill, 2018; hardback; pp. xi, 362; R.R.P. €149.00; ISBN 9789004372467. This edited volume on the role of money in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study. Twelve authors cover various aspects of the use of money and the production of coins, from c. 400 to c. 1500. The impetus behind the publication is to 'show ways in which money can be incorporated into the analysis of the Middle Ages more broadly, both for particular periods and in specific thematic contexts such as art, literature, and economic analysis' (p. 1). The first two chapters set the scene. They discuss two key aspects of money—money as a unit of value and as a means of payment. The second section comprises four chapters and covers the chronological phases of money and coinage. The origin of money is discussed by Alessia Rovelli. She also outlines the transition from gold to silver coin from the fifth to the ninth century. Andrew R. Woods continues the narrative. The period c. 800 to c. 1150 saw the emergence of the silver penny, which became the norm across Europe. At the beginning of the period, only the king had the right to strike coinage, but by the end many institutions were granted rights to administer the production or to strike coins. An increase in the quantity and variety of material objects is a feature of the next two centuries. The number of hoards of coins that have been discovered in Europe, coupled with the surge of surviving records, means that the period from c. 1150 to c. 1350 is rich with comparable data. Richard Kelleher takes us through these two centuries and also reminds us that his work builds on the seminal work [End Page 275] by Peter Spufford. Spufford's key study, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1988), is mentioned by more than one author in this edited work. Spufford outlined the history of money, including an analysis of credit and barter. Kelleher takes a similar approach by documenting medieval exchange rates and the emergence of gold currencies, or florins, in the mid-thirteenth century. Philip Robinson Rössner completes the chronological study by examining the period after the Black Death to c. 1500. He notes that 'neither the pound nor the shilling, actually existed physically, i.e. as coins' (p. 161). He suggests that this is akin to the modern concept of 'virtual money'. The final section outlines various methods of analysing medieval money and coinage. Rory Naismith sets the historical context in this section. He argues that recent discoveries of coins in sites such as towns, churches, and rural villages, have opened up new avenues for researching the role of money in medieval society. He notes that in the late twelfth century, in order to circumvent the lack of ready cash, bills of exchange were used by merchants to transfer large sums of money remotely. Small coins were also often in short supply. Nick Mayhew examines the importance of silver coins in the later medieval economy. He argues that the extreme shortage of silver at this time could have been a factor in the recession of the fifteenth century. The lowest value gold coin, a half angel, which was worth 3s 4d, was worth far more than the average daily wage of 4d. This meant that many people in the late medieval economy were unable to readily access coins for everyday uses. The last four chapters examine money and coins from archaeological, literary, and iconographic perspectives. Although authors in the earlier chapters in this book include evidence from hoards of coins that have recently been discovered, Nanouschka Myberg Burström concentrates on the use of coins as archaeological material. She asserts that coins are not easily falsified and can be of great assistance when dating other archaeological material. Anna Gannon and Lucia Travaini examine the creative aspects of minting a coin in the last two chapters. Gannon studies Anglo-Saxon creativity, whereas Travaini analyses the iconography...

Mongol Eurasia in the Trecento Veneto

When the tomb of Cangrande della Scala (d. 1329), ruler of Verona, was opened in 1921, it was found to contain an array of silks from Central Asia. These textiles are a reminder of the important links between the Veneto and Eurasian trade around 1300 - l’eta di Marco Polo. With the rise of the interconnected Mongol states from the mid-thirteenth century, Venice became a gateway between Europe and the Asian world: people and ideas, as well as materials and objects of value, moved as both commodities and gifts. This essay explores some of the ways that Mongol Eurasia penetrated the collective imagination and material culture of the fourteenth-century Veneto. The goal is to think about the larger context and implications of these links, and Venice’s function within them. What emerges is less a fascination with the exotic than an inclination to absorb new images, stories, materials, and objects into the native cultural models.

Compendium of the Study of Philosophy by Roger Bacon

Reviewed by: Compendium of the Study of Philosophy by Roger Bacon Timothy J. Johnson (bio) Roger Bacon, Compendium of the Study of Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Thomas S. Maloney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Thomas S. Maloney has once again provided an engaging and carefully edited translation and critical edition of a major text of Roger Bacon. Scholars of Bacon already enjoy Maloney's other edited translations, On Signs (Toronto, 2013) and The Art and Science of Logic (Toronto, 2009), as well as the critical edition of the Compendium of the Study of Theology (Leiden, 1988). Maloney turns his attention in this new volume to the English Minorite's Compendium studii philosophiae and, in addition to his commentary and translation, provides a critical edition of the Latin text based on the singular manuscript in existence (Cotton Tiberias C.V) in the British Museum. For those unfamiliar with the Compendium, it is important to recall that Bacon composed this work in either Paris or Oxford between 1271-1276, with 1272 or thereabouts the most likely date. He had introduced many of the key themes of the Compendium in his trilogy from 1267-1268, the Opus maius, Opus minus, and Opus tertium, in response to the request of Pope Clement IV. Bacon called for nothing less than a sweeping reform of Christendom's educational curriculum that included the sciences, philosophy, and theology. At the core of his concerns lie his advocacy of language studies, so as to produce a more accurate biblical text suitable for trustworthy teaching and the promotion of missionary activities beyond the realms of Latin Christianity. The appearance of the Compendium coincided with Pope Gregory X's convocation of the Second Council of Lyon in 1272 and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio's magisterial series of lectures, known collectively as the Hexaëmeron, in Paris between Easter and Pentecost in 1273. Scholars may paint a picture of Bacon as Bonaventure's adversary and a disgruntled friar on the margins of his religious community and mid-thirteenth century ecclesiastical agendas, but that view must be challenged. Gregory IX was clearly interested in reform as his conciliar preparations reveal, and Bonaventure, along with other friars in Paris, shared a number of concerns with their confrere, Roger Bacon. As Hans Kraml has demonstrated, the emphasis of the Doctor Mirabilis on the significance of language studies and theological hermeneutics is evident in the Scriptum in primium librum sententiarum, which William de la Mare wrote sometime shortly after 1267. He was a student of the Doctor Seraphicus and became a Regent Master at the University of Paris in 1275. Like his fellow Englishman, he was keen on correcting the version of the Vulgate in use and may have collaborated [End Page 305] with Bacon in the composition of the Correctio textus bibliae and De hebraeis et graecis vocabilis glossarum bibliae. Perhaps he also played a hand in the composition of the Compendium. The Compendium is situated within a variegated wisdom tradition that permeates the writings of his fellow Minorite mendicants. What is noteworthy about Bacon's approach to the thematic is his assumption of their basic theological foundations and his unique turn to philosophy in the articulation of that tradition. This affords him the opportunity to argue for the cultivation of wisdom throughout society with a methodology that reflects his nascent fundamental theology. Given the content and context of the on-going reflection on wisdom among Franciscan theologians like Bonaventure in the thirteenth century, Bacon's Compendium strikes this reader as a broad philosophical effort to move an assumed theological understanding of wisdom beyond church pulpits and university aulas into the mainstream of medieval culture in order to illustrate that people throughout Christendom and beyond suffer when the gift of wisdom is neither sought out nor appreciated throughout society. The text itself is divided into nine sections that treat how and why the acquisition of wisdom is essential, the impediments to wisdom, those individuals and groups whose lack of wisdom leads to error, the importance of language studies, and guidelines for translators working with Greek and Hebrew. The opening chapter promises to address wisdom and how it can be acquired. Four categories (pp. 2-3...

The Knowledge of Carpenters from the Early Medieval Period to the Eighteenth Century in Setting Out Roofs and Buildings Without Geometry and Numerical Measurement

The question of how medieval carpenters set out their work is an under-investigated topic of research. Advanced craft knowledge is needed for a study of this kind and, in that regard, this article is written from a master craftsman’s point of view. Domestic medieval roofs have consistently common roof pitches of 48°, 52°, 55° 1 and 58°, and roofs were being pitched long before the early scholars brought knowledge from the ancient world to England in the mid-twelfth century. Moreover, it is unlikely that master carpenters and masons had access to this knowledge until the early to mid-thirteenth century, and equally unlikely that the domestic carpenter had any knowledge of geometry until the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Instead, this article argues that medieval carpenters used a simple method of setting out using cord, which would obviate the need for measurement and geometry and whose common divisions correspond to the common pitches found in medieval buildings. This article is on a subject of ongoing debate in which there are a range of views, and it is anticipated that a response will be published in due course.

A study on the Introduction and Use of Cold Damage Diseases-related Literature in the Early Joseon Dynasty: Focusing on Publishing, Citation, and Textbooks.

The status or role of Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage Diseases) in Joseon is quite different compared to neighboring China and Japan. This is a unique aspect that distinguishes Joseon's medicine from other East Asian countries at that time. Prior studies have conducted research on non-professional books of Shanghan Lun; however, this study aims to analyze the transmission and utilization of professional books of Shanghan Lun. In the citations of medical books in the first half of Joseon period, the domestic introduction of professional books of Shanghan Lun used at the time occurred mostly from the mid-thirteenth century to the first half of the fifteenth century. In particular, the version of professional books of Shanghan Lun quoted in Euibangyoochui (Classified Collection of Medical Prescriptions) were centered on the Yuan edition. In other words, the acceptance of the theory of Cold Damage Diseases was based on the Yuan's medicine. Professional books of Shanghan Lun, which were published separately during the compilation or publication of Euibangyoochui, were intentionally selected. It is important to identify their characteristics. First of all, Shanghan Leishu (Classified Book of Cold Damage) was used as a textbook of Cold Damage in the first half of Joseon dynasty because the author of this book, Yang Shizhen and his practice acted as the basic text. The nature of Shanghan Leishu, which pursued the integration of "several symptoms of internal medicine" and "Cold Damage" instead of pursuing independent medicine of Cold Damage with different internal medicines, may have had some influence in forming the uniqueness of Joseon's medicine of Cold Damage. Shanghanfu (Harm Caused by Cold: A Poem) was an introduction for easy access to formal Cold Damage's content. Shanghanfu is presumed to be a medical book made out of prose poems, the core of Shanghanzhizhangtu. Non-professional books of Shanghanlun have also been cited in the first half of Joseon period's medical texts in relation to Cold Damage. However, these books were not used as textbooks in medical bureaucracy's education. The exclusion of major Cold Damage-related texts from the medical bureaucracy's education may have hampered the development of Joseon's Cold Damage medicine.

Alexander Fidora and Görge K. Hasselhof (eds.). The Talmud in Dispute During the High Middle Ages. Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, 2019, 282 p.

The Talmud in Dispute During the High Middle Ages has been produced in the framework of the ERC project The Latin Talmud and Its Influence on Christian-Jewish Polemic (LATTAL). The aim of this project, which finalized in 2019, was the study of the use of Jewish sources by Christian scholastics as apologetic materials to probe the veracity of the Catholic dogma and the falsities of Judaism. Alexander Fidora, principal researcher of the project and ICREA research professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, is also the editor of this exhaustive book composed by ten independent contributions on the Disputation of Paris and the Latin translations of the Talmud in the mid-thirteenth century.

AN EARLY VERSION OF PETER LOMBARD'S LECTURES ON THESENTENCES

The discovery of a copy (in Lincoln MS 230) of Peter Lombard's lectures on theSentencesin three books (starting with the hexameral discussion that follows the treatise on the angels in the four-book version edited by Brady) makes possible for the first time investigating the development of the Lombard's theological teaching during his Parisian teaching career and thefortunaof that teaching outside of Paris. The fact that the Lombard began his early-career lectures on theSentencesin precisely the same place as he began his lectures on Genesis means that all of his teaching originated with Scripture. Moreover, the fact that Lincoln MS 230 is one of many early copies of the Lombard's Parisian teaching found in English cathedral libraries — Lincoln's Cathedral Library has another manuscript containing another copy of theSentences, Lincoln MS 31, this one on four books, almost certainly copied within the Lombard's lifetime — has revealed the inadequacy of Brady's edition for scholarly understanding of the Lombard's career and teaching. Until now, no scholar paid much attention to the fact that Brady's choice of manuscripts was largely arbitrary and that his edition reflected the state of the Lombard's text around the time of Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus this discovery makes clear that theSentences, like Gratian'sDecretumand Comestor'sHistory, developed over time. TheSentenceswere not, as so long assumed, a book written by the Lombard late in his career but rather the product of lectures delivered over the course of his career. The discovery of a treasure trove of English manuscripts preserving the Lombard's earliest extant Parisian teaching will enable scholars for the first time to trace the origins and development of the institutional practices of the cathedral school of Paris right up to the time of its transformation into the University of Paris.

A Knight and His Library:Romanitasand Chivalry in Early Thirteenth-Century Italy

This article rethinks the importance played by Romanitas in the thought and imagination of early Duecento Italian civic knights. The starting point is the household inventory of a knight and civic officer from the city of Piacenza who owned works by Ovid, Terence, and other ancient authors. These texts were staples of the medieval school curriculum, and formed the education of future civic officers, who until the mid-thirteenth century came predominantly from the knightly classes. Romanitas and chivalry were combined in order to create an image of social prestige indispensable for those who sought to pursue a successful public career. This emerges from many contemporary literary sources, among which are a panegyric commissioned by the nobleman Bernardo di Rolando Rossi of Parma (d. 1248), and the chronicle written by Giovanni Codagnello of Piacenza (d. 1235). Fascination with antiquity was a constant in the history of the Italian cities since, at least, the twelfth century. The way in which the educated classes studied and received the classics was not fixed, but varied according to changing cultural, social, and political contexts and expectations.

Ruth Nisse. Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. xiii + 235 pp.

Reviewed by: Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England by Ruth Nisse Robert Stacey Ruth Nisse. Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. xiii + 235 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009418000661 Debates between Christians and Jews over the proper interpretation of biblical texts were staples of medieval Christian religious discourse. For the most part, Jews participated unwillingly in these debates; sometimes they did not participate at all, the Jewish position being supplied by the Christian author simply as a foil for his own exhibition of exegetical ingenuity. Over the past half century, the texts of these debates, real and imagined, have been studied by a number of notable scholars. We have all learned much from their efforts. But while new discoveries may yet be made, one cannot help but feel that most of the gold in this particular vein has by now been extracted. Ruth Nisse's extraordinary book, beautifully designed and produced by Cornell University Press, leads us in a new and altogether welcome direction in the study of the intellectual relationships between medieval Jews and Christians. Her focus is on England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, not generally regarded as a center of Jewish learning in this or any other time period. But evidence has been mounting in recent years that the Jewish scholars of medieval England were far more accomplished than we had previously realized, and that there are aspects of Jewish and Christian intellectual life in England that are both distinctive and important. This book pushes that discussion forward in exciting ways. Nisse's particular contribution is to draw our attention to the ways in which Jewish and Christian scholars sought to appropriate extrabiblical texts for their own religious traditions through translation, interpretation, and the creative compilation of diverse texts into anthologies. In her first chapter, Nisse looks at the tangled history of Flavius Josephus's Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War. Written in Greek in the first century of the Common Era, by the end of the fourth century Josephus's works had been epitomized by a patristic Latin author known as the Pseudo-Hegesippus, who presented the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE as God's punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. In the mid-tenth century, a Hebrew translation and rewriting of the Pseudo-Hegesippus had been composed in southern Italy, which circulated widely, together with several other ancient texts, in an anthology known as Sefer Yosippon. But Sefer Yosippon was no mere translation. As Nisse notes, "Yosippon … engages Hegesippus polemically and transforms this … Christian narrative about … the fate of Jerusalem into its own diasporic account of Jewish self-destruction and heroic sacrifice," creating "a new kind of Jewish spiritualizing rhetoric of resistance that later became particularly influential following the persecutions of 1096 during the First Crusade" (22). In twelfth-century England, these two competing versions of Josephus's work, one Latin and the other Hebrew, collided for the first time. Both versions laid explicit claim to present historical truth, a claim given additional weight by the fact that Yosippon was written in Hebrew, the sacred language of the Jews, [End Page 468] but acknowledged by many twelfth-century Christian scholars to be essential to interpreting the Hebrew Bible and hence to establishing the truth of the prophecies that proved Jesus to be the messiah. Yosippon, however, was a problematic text for Christian intellectuals. Not only did it omit the testimony to Jesus's messiahship that the Christianized Latin versions of Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus featured, it also included the Toledot Yeshu, a Hebrew version of Jesus's life that in Christian eyes was nothing short of blasphemous. Nevertheless, in twelfth-century England, any resulting suspicion of Hebrew as a language of mendacity, such as was expressed by Gerald of Wales, remained a minority position among English Christian intellectuals. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, this had become the majority view, not only of intellectuals but of the English Christian population at large, with serious consequences for Jewish-Christian relations and for the continuance of Jewish life in England. Among many other...

Disequilibrium, Adaptation, and the Norse Settlement of Greenland

There is increasing evidence to suggest that arctic cultures and ecosystems have followed non-linear responses to climate change. Norse Scandinavian farmers introduced agriculture to sub-arctic Greenland in the late tenth century, creating synanthropic landscapes and utilising seasonally abundant marine and terrestrial resources. Using a niche-construction framework and data from recent survey work, studies of diet, and regional-scale climate proxies we examine the potential mismatch between this imported agricultural niche and the constraints of the environment from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. We argue that landscape modification conformed the Norse to a Scandinavian style of agriculture throughout settlement, structuring and limiting the efficacy of seasonal hunting strategies. Recent climate data provide evidence of sustained cooling from the mid thirteenth century and climate variation from the early fifteenth century. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Norse made incremental adjustments to the changing sub-arctic environment, but were limited by cultural adaptations made in past environments.

Between al-Andalus and Genoa: The “Embriaci Tower” Lustreware

ABSTRACTThis article examines a set of lustreware pottery discovered in the fill of the tower belonging to the Genoese family, the Embriaci. The finds are datable to the mid-thirteenth century, characterised by decorative patterns which are atypical in lustreware production in al-Andalus, though some comparisons can be drawn with the decorative patterns of the “vasos de la Alhambra” and the pottery known as “nazarí primitive”. The context of the discovery in Genoa will briefly be outlined, including the story of the family settlement (Part 1), the stratigraphic sequence (Part 2), and the stylistic connections to other pottery characterising it (Part 3). The formal and decorative elements characterising the lustreware pottery found in the Embriaci Tower will then be examined and compared (Part 4) with finds from the Upper Tyrrhenian region (Provence, Savona, Pisa). Part 5 will suggest that the finds are a specific type of decorated lustreware produced in the thirteenth century in al-Andalus (Murcia, Málaga and Almería). The concluding part (Part 6) will investigate the meaning of the presence of the set of imported ceramics in the “curia” of the Embriaci family in Genoa.This type of pottery has only been discovered hitherto in excavation finds and architectural contexts (the so called “bacini”) in Italy and France. The identification of decorative and formal elements characterising this “group” of pottery will allow the identification of examples of this production outside of Italy and France. The publication of the findings will provide new data to develop an archaeological overview of commercial contacts between al-Andalus and the Tyrrhenian area (Provence, Liguria, Tuscany) during the thirteenth century.

GuidoAlfani and Cormac ÓGráda (eds.) Famine in European HistoryCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi + 325 p. $89.99; $29.99 (pbk.).

This impressive volume presents a series of quantitatively rich historical studies by leading scholars that together offer a broad picture of famine in Europe—scale, context, and cause and effect—from medieval times onward. Eight chapters cover specific countries or regions of Western Europe; another treats the European areas of the former Soviet Union. Only a north–south segment of the continent from Poland to the Balkans is not accorded this specialized attention. The main period is from the late Middle Ages (earlier for the Nordic countries) to the nineteenth century. A final chapter focuses on the famines of the two world wars. The definition of famine used by the contributors is Cormac Ó Gráda's: “a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.” This formulation combines Amartya Sen's (and Adam Smith's) view of famine as largely an entitlement failure—a man-made event—with simpler notions of “natural” causes such as crop failure. In each chapter the basic data drawn on to statistically identify famine years are recorded time series of deaths or burials and food prices, especially wheat. These materials are supplemented from contemporary accounts and case studies. The consistent definition and roughly uniform approach of the regional studies allow the editors to present, in their introductory overview, “the first truly comparative chronology of European famines.” Their listing ranges from the famines of the mid-thirteenth century in Italy, Spain, and Britain to those of the 1860s in the Nordic countries, Ukraine, and Russia. The three most widespread European famines over this period occurred in 1315–17 (the so-called Great Famine, “the worst food crisis of the late Middle Ages”), 1590–98 (the trough of the Little Ice Age, though its link to the famine is contested), and 1693–97 (affecting Scandinavia, France, and Italy especially). More regionally limited famines, describing most of those identified, could be just as devastating. The Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, though it “hardly qualifies for inclusion in a shortlist of the main European famines of all times,” killed a million people and forced the emigration of even more. The discussions of the causes of famine in the volume emphasize the range of factors involved. Weather, of course, figures prominently, especially harvest failures due to heavy spring and summer rains, with distant volcanic eruptions, sunspot cycles, and climate trends contributing as well. Crop and cattle diseases also play a role: New World crops—maize in Italy, the potato in Ireland—proved particularly susceptible. Man-made famine has mostly been war-related. Recent research has not supported earlier charges of intentional British and Soviet policy, beyond mere callousness, behind the Great Irish Famine or the Ukrainian and Moldovan famines of the 1930s and 1940s. Revisionist interpretations point rather to ignorance and poor judgment. Contributors also explore the consequences of famine. Demographically, even massive famine death tolls seemingly left overall population trends little affected—the conclusion reached by Watkins and Menken in PDR, 11, no. 4. Ireland is the chief exception to this. (Epidemic disease for the most part is similarly hard to discern in the aggregate population record, though here the main exception is spectacular: the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, which by a recent estimate killed over half of Europe's population.) Political instability is a surer famine outcome; indeed, by some accounts, food crises helped trigger the revolutionary events of 1789, 1848, and 1917. Famine in Europe had largely ended in the nineteenth century, only to return in strikingly man-made form in the disruptions of food supplies in World Wars I and II. The authors of this chapter, Stephen Wheatcroft and Ó Gráda, remark that in both situations, “the threat of massive continental mortality caused by food shortages was only narrowly averted by an unusually active international aid policy.” The volume's editors, noted experts in famine studies, are economic historians at Bocconi University, Milan and University College Dublin. Comprehensive bibliography, index.

The Origins of ‘Alien Status’ in the English Common Law

ABSTRACTIn his 2001 monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship, Dr Keechang Kim suggested that there was no evidence before the late fourteenth century that birth beyond the sea made a person an alien. This article discusses a series of cases heard from the mid-thirteenth century onwards in which tenants pleaded the claimant's birth overseas by way of bar to hereditary claims to land and in which it seems to have been treated as a bar in itself, though one to which the king might grant special exemption. This seems to have remained the position until legislation of 1351 (triggered by doubts about the eligibility of two sons of Edward III born overseas to succeed to the throne) which not only confirmed their eligibility but also made the first general extension of the right to inherit to children born overseas to parents in the king's allegiance.

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen's Australasian Cockatoo: Symbol of Detente between East and West and Evidence of the Ayyubids' Global Reach

Frederick II of Sicily made contact with the Kurdish al-Malik Muhammad al-Kamil in 1217—a year before al-Malik became sultan of Egypt. The two rulers communicated regularly over the following twenty years, exchanging letters, books and rare and exotic animals. The focus of this article is the Sulphur-crested or Yellow-crested Cockatoo the sultan sent Frederick. A written description and four sketches of this parrot survive in a mid thirteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library. This article reviews these images, revealing that Australasian cockatoos were present in the Middle East in the medieval period and exploring how and why one reached Europe in the mid thirteenth century.

Friars, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the Dissolution of the Dominican and Franciscan Priories in Sixteenth-century Beverley

Particularly when they came to die, the inhabitants of Beverley in the early Tudor period were still actively seeking the services of their Dominican and Franciscan friars whose priories had been established in the town in the mid-thirteenth century. After the calling of the Reformation parliament in 1529, some of these friars vehemently opposed Henry VIII’s break with Rome and played a crucial role as intermediaries in the Pilgrimage of Grace which began on Westwood in October 1536. The extent of the rebellion convinced the government of the need to eradicate the religious orders in their entirety and in the ensuing dissolution of the remaining monasteries the two Beverley friaries fell to the crown in late February 1539. This, however, did not quite extinguish all traces of mendicancy in the area since the last prior of the Black Friars continued to live in the town for another two decades until he died still a Dominican at heart in 1558.

The Hierarchical Center in the Thought of St. Bonaventure

The Hierarchical Center in the Thought of St. Bonaventure Luke Togni (bio) The relationship between Bonaventure and Dionysius in scholarship is a little peculiar. Bonaventure's use of hierarchy or other Dionysian tropes and concepts, together with his knowledge of Dionysius, is taken for granted but he is rarely analysed as a reader of Dionysius. Their ideas are compared while their texts, generally, are not. Since so many different Dionysii have been proffered in the last hundred years, from a duplicitous pagan holdout to a cryptic Constantinopolitan scholar to a liturgically-oriented Syrian monk, against just which one Bonaventure might be compared is practically a matter of taste. The profusion of Dionysii makes it all more necessary to crack open the Corpus Dionysiacum (hereon, CD) to measure Bonaventure's dependence upon, recasting of, and divergence from the Areopagite. As a mid-thirteenth century, Paris-educated theologian, the CD Bonaventure knew was an assemblage of multiple translations, annotations, and commentaries, that is, Corpus Dionysiacum Parisiense (hereon, CDP) represented in the ms. BnF Lat. 17341.1 Besides that weighty [End Page 137] corpus, Jacques-Guy Bougerol argued that Bonaventure also made use of another edition of Eriugena's translation of the CD modified by John Saracen's nova translatio.2 It is through these texts with their particular narratives, vocabulary, interpretations, explanations, and even corrections that Bonaventure the Dionysian will be found. Developing such an account of Bonaventure's Dionysianism based on a close reading of his thirteenth century sources, even in outline, is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I will provide one illustrative example of the benefit of reading Bonaventure against the backdrop of Dionysius' ipsissima verba. I will analyze a similarity in the way Bonaventure uses the Dionysian concept of hierarchy to coordinate the relationships and activities of God, the angels, and redeemed humanity in (primarily) three works, the Breviloquium (1257), the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259-60), and the Collationes in Hexaemeron (1273).3 In all three of these works (and elsewhere in his corpus) hierarchy appears in the fourth and central section of a septenary structure. Bonaventure's regular use of numbers in a coordinating and symbolic function suggests that this common placement is no accident. The number four's centrality expresses his evaluation of hierarchy as the axis upon which the spiritual life turns. I will show, however, that these three works read together tell of more than just hierarchy's centrality, but rather, that hierarchy and Christ's saving incarnation are inseparable and constitute a unified act of worship. My interpretation is based on reading the fourth sections of the Breviloquium, Itinerarium, and Collationes in Hexaemeron alongside Dionysius' On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy IV4 (hereon, EH), itself the fourth of seven [End Page 138] sections, where Bonaventure would have read of the incarnate Christ's deifying power throughout the ecclesiastical and angelic hierarchies. Appreciating Bonaventure's literary familiarity with EH IV and the Christ's role as the ἀρχή of hierarchy in the EH and On the Celestial Hierarchy (hereon, CH) in general explains that, contrary to Jacques-Guy Bougerol's opinion that Bonaventure "inserted Jesus Christ into the Dionysian system to the point of transforming it entirely", Dionysius supplies Bonaventure with a Christocentric notion of hierarchy which he develops and deploys in the novel, but nonetheless largely congruent, figure of "Christ the hierarch" and the doctrine of the triplex verbum: the un-created, incarnate, and inspired Word who creates, redeems, and deifies.5 The Dionysian scholarship of he first half of the twentieth-century privileged the metaphysical, taxonomical, and epistemic aspects his Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, and Mystical Theology to the neglect of the soteriological and liturgical concerns of the EH (and CH, too) and the treatment of hierarchy Bonaventure has been framed accordingly.6 Beginning in the 1980s, Dionysian scholarship began to re-evaluate the importance of the liturgical dimension of Dionysius' thought and, especially, hierarchy.7 This turn in Dionysian studies, however, has no [End Page 139] yet raised new questions of Bonaventure's reception of the Areopagite's liturgically-oriented thought, which retained its sacerdotal and cultic terminology in both Eriugena's translation and the commentaries based upon it.8 By...