The Mediaeval Journal

The end of the Carolingian dynasty shortly after the death of King Lothar III (954–86) has tended to overwrite that king’s considerable activity in his reign. This is especially evident in the counties of the old Spanish March, now mostly parts of Catalonia, as they came under renewed pressure from the caliphate of Córdoba. This article examines three counts of this area circa 981, when one of them received a letter from Lothar, and finds each of them using a different strategy to justify their possession of what had once been regalian rights. By examining changes in their representations, it goes on to show that the rulers here relied on royalist ideological arguments sufficiently to enable a king to make his voice heard at their courts even in the very last years of the Carolingian era

This paper considers the influence of popular scientific theories on the vernacular drama of the English Middle Ages. It does so by considering a minor yet significant moment in the York play of The Conspiracy, where Judas’s face is ‘read’ by the figure of the Janitor according to the popular principles of physiognomy. This instance, and the tradition which informs it, may help to broaden our sense of the ways in which scientific theories were received and understood in the medieval period and, specifically, how they found ways into literary and performance texts and reached varied audiences.

This essay firstly argues that the term ‘accountability’ is not always helpfully applied in historical and other analyses, despite its ubiquity and importance. Its analytical importance is illustrated through examination of a letter of Pope Benedict XVI. Next this analysis is extended through a discussion of accountability’s problematic standing in relation to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italian podestà and their liability to the accountability of sindacatio. A more nuanced distinction between exacted accountability and granted responsibility is needed, and is apparent in this historical context. Finally, the previous arguments are used to develop a more general interpretative model of how to think about accountability in historical and other analyses.

This article reviews recent work by Polish medievalists representing a new kind of political history, one which breaks with formal, specialized statecraft, law, and institutions, in favour of an inquiry into power: its experience, representation, distribution, and contestation. This conceptual shift relates to a resurgence of interest among medievalists in late-Carolingian and Ottonian Germany, and aims to be a conceptual benchmark for these subjects. Both shifts are visible in several historiographies, among which the Polish remains relatively unknown for linguistic reasons. An excellent sample of that work is contained in three books, published in Poland in the last decade, and subsequently translated into English, about the power of the Polish dukes in the dynasty’s formative early period. The article situates the books in the context of the new political history, and addresses the implications of their translation.

The Byzantine World (ed. by Paul Stephenson) BERENIKE WALBURG - The Munich Computus: Text and Tradition. Irish Computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its Reception in Carolingian Times (by Immo Warntjes) FAITH WALLIS -The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (ed. by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker with William Green) KATHRYN A. LOWE - Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (by Amy Livingstone) KATE HAMMOND - The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages (by Robert Fossier, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane) RICHARD JONES - Law and Practice in the Age of Reform: The Legatine Work of Hugh of Die (1073–1106) (by Kriston R. Rennie) BRUCE C. BRASINGTON - John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremond and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund (ed. by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards ) ORIETTA DA ROLD