The Mediaeval Journal

The Muslims of tenth-century Provence are a permanent fixture in the realm of folklore and legend. Through numerous attempts to explain and justify their historic settlement in southern France between the 890s and 970s, a number of mistruths have become the accepted standard in modern French historiography. Centuries of historical analysis have tended to obscure rather than clarify the course of events. In order to understand how this ‘Saracen legend’ was first created, this article examines modern historical and methodological approaches that have both shaped and perpetuated our view of the region. It asks how the story has evolved, and why it has remained so prevalent in the French historiography on tenth-century Provence.

Part 5 of Bernard Gui’s inquisitors’ manual Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis is rightly well known for its descriptions of heretics and their beliefs, and of the inquisition’s interrogation techniques. The rest of the Practica has been less well studied. This article argues that Parts 1-3 were a valuable and well-organized resource for the manual’s inquisitorial audience; but that, while continuing to adhere to the inquisition’s norms, they were in part written in such a way as to convey indirectly messages about how to tackle the more difficult and delicate parts of the inquisition’s tasks where the norms of inquisitorial behaviour could not be maintained. Parts 1-3 therefore have more to offer the modern historian both about inquisitorial techniques and the political and social context in which Gui operated than has sometimes been realized.

Precious liquids associated with Christ, a saint, or holy sites were collected and treasured by pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. By the high medieval period, flocks of pilgrims visited holy sites and saints’ tombs where liquids associated with a holy body could be collected. La Sainte Larme, the holy tear of Christ, boomed in popularity, leaving a trail of associated ampullae across Europe. Nor was it just the Sainte Larme that was revered. Saints’ lives from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries confirm the importance of heavenly droplets shed by would-be saints. At this time, lachrymose piety became a salient feature of sanctity for religious men and women. Using the vitae of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century holy women and a wide range of sources relating to the Saint Larme, this essay puts together a picture of these little-known, yet highly revered, relics. Applying an interdisciplinary and integrated approach that examines the material, visual, and written sources for tears relics, it provides a textured analysis of the methods of collection, preservation, use, and veneration of tears. The article explores how tears relics were particularly fertile bearers of meaning and how Christians lived their religion through interaction with the material. The use and veneration of tears was multisensory and emotive, and it will be shown how tears relics were an apposite medium for stimulating emotional responses. In sum, it argues that tears relics, unknown before the eleventh century, were the product of the particular spiritual climate of the high Middle Ages when a tide of lachrymal piety swept across Western Europe and an emotional and multisensory experience of relics was at the heart of pilgrims’ devotion.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uniquely blends romance and moral themes, prompting critics to argue that marvel in this poem is merely decorative or subversive with regard to moral assumptions. This essay shows instead that marvel critically informs the poem’s moral thought. Marvel teaches us about human beings’ personal relationship with God as a source of virtue, and further alerts us to the moral significance of passions. Both friendship with God and passions vitally complement the rational ideal of ‘trawthe’ as grounded in obligation. Historical background to the poem’s reaffirmation of this traditional perspective can be seen in the rise of the competitive ethics of obligation in the late Middle Ages.

Some illuminated manuscripts seem as untouched and unchanged today as they must have at their creation. The Carew-Poyntz Hours is not such a manuscript. Begun in the middle of the fourteenth century, its leaves were gradually illuminated, its images defaced, and its devotional programme upended over the next hundred years. I argue that the result of its abortive first campaign was malleability, the potential for creative and re-creative material and devotional changes. Although the patrons’ names are lost, their physical interactions with the book reveal much about their identities. Ultimately, it was this appearance of a work-in-progress that inspired several generations of medieval people to manipulate the Carew-Poyntz Hours.