Thirteenth-Century Paris Research Articles

“It Requires Privacy”: Sharing a House in Thirteenth-Century Paris

AbstractAnalysis of a legal ruling by Yehiel of Paris (d. ca. 1260) in a rental dispute between two Jewish men sheds light on aspects of Jewish life in a major medieval European city. Two Jews rented an apartment from a Christian owner, and a dispute arose when one of the tenants left mid-term and his replacement, also a Jewish man, tried to renew the lease directly with the landlord. The original tenant claimed the exclusive right to renew the lease and that he was unwilling to share the apartment with the new tenant as this would impinge on his privacy in use of the lavatory. This article attempts to unravel the legal and cultural dimensions of the dispute and the demographic and architectural realities underpinning it. The article maintains that the disputants’ legal arguments drew upon both Jewish legal tradition and the legal norms of the rental market in Paris. The legal and cultural significance of privacy in the medieval urban context also plays an important role in the case.

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians and the Boundary between Humans and Animals, by Ian P. Wei

<i>Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians and the Boundary between Humans and Animals</i>, by Ian P. Wei

Ian P. Wei. Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals.

Journal Article Ian P. Wei. Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals. Get access Ian P. Wei. Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. vii, 226. Cloth $99.99. Alex J. Novikoff Alex J. Novikoff Kenyon College, US Email: novikoff1@kenyon.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 972–973, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad155 Published: 22 June 2023

The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

<i>The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives</i> <i>Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals</i>

Differentiating hands in square chant notation

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a methodology for differentiating between scribal hands in square chant notation. Drawing on several Dominican chant books copied in thirteenth-century Paris, the methodology outlined here may also prove a useful starting point for approaching square chant notations from various other origins. Specifically, this approach highlights eight parameters that may be useful for identifying and distinguishing scribal hands in square chant notation, namely, by examining the forms of F-clefs, custodes, liquescent neume shapes, general neume shapes and/or note groupings, C-clefs, accidentals, hairline extensions and the general appearance of the notation. This methodology is used to identify the notators working within the chant books of the Dominican exemplar manuscript Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1, demonstrating the presence of one main notator, an ‘overseer’ or corrector intervening across several parts of the manuscript to supply missing material, and a second corrector or user of the manuscript adding missing material on one folio only. Through such palaeographical study, it was possible to reveal the different roles of the scribes notating this manuscript, to hypothesise about the process by which the liturgical material within the manuscript was compiled and to identify a potential network of notators working in Dominican manuscripts in Paris in the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

Book Review: Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundaries Between Humans and Animals

Book Review: Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundaries Between Humans and Animals

Between Foreigners, Strangers and Jews: The Changing Perception of Parisian Jews on the Eve of the 1306 Expulsion

Abstract An unpublished document from late thirteenth-century Paris contains evidence of a Jewish-Christian public confrontation, on the one hand, and of Jewish-Christian economic criminal collaboration on the other. Using methods of micro-history, this article traces the story of Merot the Jew and his father-in-law, Benoait of St. Denis, who were caught attempting to smuggle merchandise by way of the River Seine. Their story is told in a verdict handed down by the parloir de Paris, the municipal judicial authority in charge of economic infractions. The parloir decreed the complete confiscation of Merot and Benoait’s merchandise on the grounds that “they were foreigners.” Taking this terminology as a point of departure, this paper tackles broader socio-economic aspects of belonging and foreignness among medieval Parisian Jews, and asks: in what ways were Jews considered “foreigners” in late thirteenth-century Paris? What were the implications of such a designation, and how did these perceptions change in the years leading up to the expulsion of 1306?

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei

Reviewed by: Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei Irven M. Resnick Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals. By Ian P. Wei. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 226. $99.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-108-83015-7. The contemporary interest in the inner life of animals and animal rights is an indication of a growing awareness that the line of demarcation between human and animal is not as clear as once thought. A Cartesian view of animals as nonsentient automata that, in the words of Malebranche, "eat without pleasure, cry without pain … desire nothing, fear nothing, [and] know nothing" (Nicholas Malebranche, The Search after the Truth 6.2.7, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 494-95) seems unsustainable the more we learn of animal behavior. Experiments in animal psychology increasingly challenge the early modern notion that higher animals lack self-consciousness and awareness of their own mortality, thereby depriving them of the imperative to live purposively. Instead, the line between human and animal (or at least between the human and those we call higher animals) seems drawn on ever-shifting sand. Much the same may be said for medieval Scholastic views of animals. Despite attempts to establish a "hard boundary" between human and animal, a fixed boundary remained elusive. Human and animal bodies and behaviors offered too many similarities. It is abundantly clear that medieval Latin exempla and sermons treat animal behavior as instructive for humans. Positively, animals will display naturally some of the most noble human qualities: chastity, monogamy, a self-sacrificing defense of progeny, and even a natural solicitude for elderly parents. Negatively, animals provide examples of the very worst in humanity: predatory behavior, violence, carnality, promiscuity, and gluttony. While medieval bestiaries and medieval fabliaux reveal animals and animal societies to be very nearly human, medieval polemics invoke animal stereotypes to dehumanize and stigmatize religious "others" (i.e., Jews, Muslims, and heretics). Controversy remains over the extent to which animals were valued beyond their contributions to the medieval European domestic economy as food sources (pigs, sheep, dairy cows), as beasts of burden (donkeys, oxen), as hunting aides (dogs, cats, falcons, hawks), as support for warfare (horses), or as sources of entertainment (dancing bears and the organ grinder's monkey). Modern research has proposed, moreover, that in the Middle Ages service animals (e.g., [End Page 479] seeing-eye dogs) even assisted individuals with disabilities, and there is also a growing awareness—promoted, for example, by Kathleen Walker-Meikle's Medieval Pets—that in later medieval culture some animals achieved the special status reserved for our pets today as quasi family members. On the one hand, even though medieval philosophers and theologians generally denied that animals have free will or can be held morally responsible, by the fourteenth century legal proceedings were convened to convict and punish animals for criminal assault against humans or their property. On the other hand, although animals were seen as cognitively inferior to humans, some animals were invested with almost prophetic insight: after Aubry de Montdidier's murder in 1371, his dog Dragon reacted with such violence toward his murderer, Richard Macaire, that King Charles V ordered a trial by combat in which Dragon was victorious and Macaire was condemned for homicide. Furthermore, although these same medieval thinkers denied that animals can sin or possess moral virtue, in popular culture some animals even achieved sainthood (see Jean-Claude Schmitt's The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century). Ian P. Wei's Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris is not a cultural history of animals devoted to an investigation of their roles in the medieval domestic economy, in homiletic literature, or in vernacular fabliaux. Instead Wei provides a focused discussion of what several thirteenth-century theology masters at the University of Paris said about humans and animals. He traces Scholastic theological discussions that explore the similarities and differences between "us" and "them." In three chapters Wei provides a "close reading" and detailed paraphrase of a...

Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei

Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei

Artists and Autonomy: Written Instructions and Preliminary Drawings for the Illuminator in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea (HM 3027)

This essay will examine the presence of written instructions and preliminary drawings for the illuminator visible in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, the oldest surviving extensively illuminated manuscript of the text in Latin. It is an excellent example of the collaborative nature of manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris. What is particularly interesting is that there are a number of occasions where the miniatures deviate from the text, from the written instructions to the illuminator, and even from the preliminary sketches, which suggest that the artist had some agency in determining the iconography and appearance of the final images. I will discuss these deviations and the broader implications of some of these choices in terms of manuscript production, the status of the artist, and the ideological implications of some of the imagery.

Motion, Contact and Profanity in Rutebeuf’s Tales of ‘Charlot Le Juif’: (Not) Going There, (Not) Touching That

Abstract This article explores what we can learn about the context of thirteenth-century Paris from the relation between what is explicit and implicit in Rutebeuf’s tales of Charlot the Jew. Dated to the 1260s, these two texts – ‘La Disputaison de Charlot et du Barbier de Melun’ and ‘Charlot le juif qui chia dans la peau du lièvre’ – survive in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1635. In themselves, in relation to one another and in their manuscript context, these tales reveal much about the function of hints and hidden jokes as soundings of intercommunal tensions and polemic in the period between the Paris Disputation of 1240 and the outbursts of violence later in the century. The discussion of the text focuses on the representation of cultural and religious provocation, and especially Rutebeuf ’s possible adumbrating of sensitive issues not always addressed in explicit fashion. Charlot’s seeming resistance to provocation in various regards may thus reflect a context in which Louis IX encouraged the lay population to take direct action in response to any perceived insults against Christianity from the Jewish population.

Emily Davenport Guerry. Review of "The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris" by Meredith Cohen.

Emily Davenport Guerry. Review of "The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris" by Meredith Cohen.

THE PRODUCTION OF POLYPHONIC MANUSCRIPTS IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY PARIS: NEW EVIDENCE FOR STANDARDISED PROCEDURES

Modern understanding of the production and dissemination of thirteenth-century polyphony is constrained by the paucity of manuscript sources that have been preserved in their entirety; the panorama of sources of medieval polyphony is essentially fragmentary. Some of the surviving fragments, however, were torn from lost books of polyphony that were to some extent comparable to well-known extant codices. The fragment of polyphony preserved in the binding of manuscript 6528 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid is illustrative in this respect. This fragment displays a number of codicological and musical features that are strikingly similar to those of the Florence manuscript (F). Both sources share format and mise-en-page, make use of similar styles of script, notation and pen-work decoration, transmit the pieces in the same order, and present virtually identical musical readings. The Madrid fragment thus provides new evidence for a standardised production of polyphonic books in thirteenth-century Paris. The study provides a detailed account of the fragment’s codicological and philological features, and explores the hypothesis that it originated in the same Parisian workshop that produced F.

The Persistence of Buildings and the Context Problem

Raising the persistence question about architectural entities consists in asking what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future architectural entity, like a building, to exist now. In this paper I investigate how the persistence question about buildings is affected by their spatial relocation. Why do we normally doubt that Notre Dame can survive its meticulous stone-by-stone transfer to Las Vegas? I argue that, since architectural plans are not capable of specifying all the constitutive properties of a building, the source of differentiation among constitutive and non-constitutive properties for buildings lies in a property’s being eligible or not eligible to be aesthetically relevant in the aesthetic judgements about them. As a matter of fact, our aesthetic judgements about buildings often concern, and are grounded on, extrinsic contextual properties. This explains why buildings can usually not survive relocation: because normally there is no basis for ruling out any extrinsic contextual feature of the building as inessential. I also try to explain why the change from thirteenth century Paris to contemporary Paris proved not to be lethal to Notre Dame’s persistence, in spite of its being more significant than other imaginary context changes that we would easily count as fatal.

Santa Barbara’s Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible: A Second Look

Abstract The Santa Barbara Bible (University of California, Santa Barbara, University Library MS BS 75 1250) was first introduced to scholarship in 1971 by Santa Barbara professor Larry Ayres. In the years since that pioneering study, art historians have advanced our knowledge of the place and date of the Bible’s production. Adding to that an understanding of commercial manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris, the present article comes as close to clarifying the creation of this lovely book as current evidence allows.

Vera loqui liceat. Eine ungedruckte Satire gegen die ungastlichen Zisterzienser von Pipewell

The late thirteenth-century manuscript Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Ms. lat. 11867 (and the membrum disiectum in Ms. lat. 9376, fol.61r-72v) is famous for its large collection of Latin poems and letters, e. g. the poems of Alexander Neckam and the so-called Campanian letter collection. Among the still unpublished items the manuscript preserves an anonymous satire in 28 goliardic stanzas directed against the inhospital Cistercians of Pipewellin Nottinghampshire (P fol. 102vb-103ra, Inc. Vera loqui liceat: quisquis es, asculta, WIC 20145). In its first part (st. 7-19) the author gathers the accusations commonly proffered against the Cistercians, whereas in the second part (st. 20-28) he describes how he went to Pipewell to discharge a friend’s debts. There he expected to be served a meal better than that ordinarily prescribed by the Rule, given the fact that he had arrived on the very day of the abbot’s return from the annual general chapter of the Cistercians; but he received only cabbage, coarse...

The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: production, reception &amp; performance in Western Christianity

ContentsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations1. Orientation for the ReaderSusan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly2. The Bible and the LiturgySusan Boynton3. Bibles, Biblical Books, and the Monastic Liturgy in the Early Middle AgesRichard Gyug4. When Monks Were the Book: The Bible and Monasticism (6th-11th Centuries)Isabelle Cochelin5. The Bible and the Meaning of HistoryJennifer A. Harris6. Lectern Bibles and Liturgical Reform in the Central Middle AgesDiane J. Reilly7. The Italian Giant BiblesLila Yawn8. Biblical Exegesis Through the Twelfth CenturyFrans van Liere9. Mendicant School ExegesisBert Roest10. A Ladder Set Up on Earth: The Bible in Medieval SermonsEyal Poleg11. The Bible and the Individual: The Thirteenth-Century Paris BibleLaura Light12. The Illustrated Psalter: Luxury and Practical UseStella Panayotova13. The Bible in English in the Middle AgesRichard Marsden14. The Old French Bible: The First Complete Vernacular Bible in Western EuropeClive R. Sneddon15. Castilian Vernacular Bibles in Iberia, c. 1250-1500Emily C. FrancomanoGlossaryContributorsIndex