Viator

"Branwen, Beowulf; and the Tragic Peaceweaver Tale." Although it has long been assumed that the Middle Welsh tale Branwen Uerch Lyr, the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, is primarily a pastiche of story-elements from the mythological and literary traditions of medieval Ireland, many of the narrative elements of Branwen belong to the large, migratory stock of international folktale motifs and are better seen in the broader context of the traditional tale. It has also been thought that the narrative structure of Branwen is essentially that of a "calumniated wife" tale, though in fact most of the defining elements of such tales are missing from the Welsh narrative. The basis of Branwen is instead another traditional story of the Middle Ages, the "peaceweaver" tale, the best examples of which appear not in Celtic narrative but in the stories of Hildeburh and Freawaru in the "digressions" of Beowulf The Old English poem and the Middle Welsh tale both give us versions of a fundamental and widespread medieval story of the exogamous dynastic marriage which tries but fails to overcome social feud and political antagonism.

"Royal Familiares in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100-1187." This article identifies and describes royal familiares in the twelfth-century Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Constitutional history in the Latin Kingdom was dominated by the Haute Cour. The court met to advise the king on important matters, including legislation, administration and justice. Magnates and royal familiares who attended the court were more influential than holders of the smaller fiefs. C. Warren Hollister pioneered the use of royal acta as an investigative tool when he identified Anglo-Norman familiares for the period 1066-1135. Far fewer royal charters survive from the Latin Kingdom than from Anglo-Norman England. Therefore, royal acta are supported here with evidence from twelfth-century chronicles of the kingdom. Charts showing attestation rates, combined with descriptions of the curiales and their holdings, illuminate the history of the monarchy in Outremer. The charts show a gradual shift from a preponderance of minor nobles, clerics and demense tenants as favorites, to a dominating group of tenants-in-chief. The process by which the native nobility undermined an originally strong monarchy is clarified.

"The Illustrated Sermons of James the Monk: Their Dates, Order, and Place in the History of Byzantine Art." In an effort to establish when James the monk lived, the author examines the manuscripts containing James's works, the letters to Irene Sebastokratorissa, Paris. gr. 3039, and the Sermons on the life of the Virgin, Paris. gr. 1208 and Vat. gr. 1162. James's portrait in the Paris Sermons shows that he was alive when the book was illuminated; on the basis of stylistic comparisons it is argued that the manuscript was most likely made sometime during the 1120s or 1130s. The Vatican Sermons is shown to be the later of the two copies; its date is placed in the 1140s or 1150s, around the time the letters to Irene were gathered in a handsome volume. Finally, the relevance of the manuscripts of James's writings to twelfth-century society, and in particular to the taste of the Byzantine court, is considered.

"Huguccio of Pisa: Canonist, Bishop, and Grammarian?" The article reexamines the biographical data available for the twelfth-century canonist Huguccio. It focuses in particular on his commonly accepted identification with Bishop Huguccio of Ferrara (1190-1210), and with the grammarian Huguccio of Pisa who wrote the famous etymological dictionary, Derivationes. As a matter of fact, no one prior to Mauro Sarti (1769) had suggested this triple identity, which he tried to prove on the basis of narrative and relatively late sources only. The present study offers conclusions that derive from all of Huguccio's own writings and a dossier of papal letters related to the bishop of Ferrara. The evaluation of this material reconfirms the identification of the bishop and the canonist, but renders questionable the link between him and the grammarian. Among other things, the argument includes new biographical evidence drawn from the Derivationes, an extensive critique of Guiseppe Cremascoli's edition of the Agiographia (1978), and some remarks on the use of etymologies in the canonistic Summa.

"Attitudes Towards the Mongols in Medieval literature: The XXII Kings of Gog and Magog from the Court of Frederick II to Jean de Mandeville." This article gives an example of how myth and historical fact interpenetrated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It shows how texts on the wonders of nature and an episode from the Alexander Romance were brought together and progressively modified during the period in which Europeans first became aware of the Mongols. These modifications reflect the change of attitude towards the Mongols, from the initial hope that they-would help western Christians and destroy Islam from the rear, through a period in which they were viewed with deep mistrust and fear, to a time when they could safely be relegated to the pages of an entertaining and not-too- factual travel book. The first half of the article describes the nature and sources of a recently discovered text-the Mirabilia mundi-which identifies the races of Gog and Magog with the Mongols and forms the starting point of the discussion. The second half attempts to locate this text and its relatives in their historical context, and ends with an account of its influence on Jean de Mandeville's Travels.

"The School Sermon Exported: The Case of Pelagius Parvus." Most studies of medieval preaching have naturally concentrated on well-known individuals and on the leading centers for the dissemination of sermon collections, like Paris. Important as these studies are, it remains unclear how the school sermon style, developed in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was used outside the intellectual centers of Europe. This article is a case study of the sermons of one provincial preacher, Pelagius Parvus, a Portuguese Dominican who flourished in the 1240s. It seeks to show that even in a comparatively remote part of Europe, Pelagius was well aware of the latest developments in sermon design. He organizes his sermons in the fashion recommended by the thirteenth-century artes praedicandi, and he relies on the same types of reference tools that were available to preachers in other areas. While he is sometimes critical of the content of the learning at the schools, he uses the school-sermon style to make his sermons both more effective and easier to write.

"The Medieval Circulation of the De morali principis institutione of Vincent of Beauvais." In this article we reconstruct the transmission and trace the circulation of the De morali Principis institutione, a treatise on kingship written for Louis IX of France by the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais about 1262. This work, the first volume of a projected but uncompleted "opus universale" on politics, discourses on political power and legitimacy and advises the prince on the wisdom he should display in governance and on the vices of the court he must contend with. However, this most original of Vincent's treatises appears to have been ignored by Louis's Capetian and Valois successors and began to circulate only some fifty years after the author's death. The nine manuscripts and one incunabulum which survive belong to two families. One, the descendants probably of Vincent's fair copy, circulated anonymously and haphazardly on the Continent; its copies were made and remained in Paris and Basel. The others, descendants probably of the dedication copy, circulated in England, southern France or Catalonia, and northern Germany and Scandinavia. The treatise was disseminated largely through houses of the Dominican order, which sought to disseminate works of its writers through its priories and studia, and not by the French monarchy, which would have opposed Vincent's argument for political legitimacy.

"The Papacy, the Sicilian Church, and King Frederick III (1302-1321)." Frederick III, who emerged shakily from the war of the Sicilian Vespers as the new ruler, sought to shore up his political position by allying himself with the Sicilian church, which had suffered great damage during the conflict. This policy, common enough in the Middle Ages, was complicated by several factors: the government's need to appeal as well to the inland barons, who had been the chief attackers of ecclesiastical holdings; Catalan demands for various postings and privileges at a time of particularly strong Sicilian xenophobia; Sicily's unexpected acquisition of the duchy of Athens, which gave new urgency to papal and Angevin attempts to remove Frederick from power; and the support found at court and among the populace for the heterodox Franciscan Spirituals, at least some of whom believed Frederick to be the prophesied king who would inaugurate the final age before the Second Coming of Christ. Royal-ecclesiastical relations after 1300, so typical in many ways, thus offer a unique perspective on several of the major developments in the Mediterranean world in the first half of the fourteenth century.

"The Romance of Exchange: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Sir Gawain and the Green Knight invites discussion in the light of contemporary theories of exchange. Central to its plot are various contracts, exchanges, and negotiations, but the poem also underlines the uncertainty of ascribed value and the impossibility of symmetrical exchange in such transactions, by offering a series of shifting and competing perspectives, both within the poem, and in the narrative's seduction of the reader. It is only at the end, for example, that the structure of emboîtement reveals Gawain's agreement with Bertilak's wife as the heart of the poem. The poem's formal equipoise attempts to contain these differences and imbalances; yet even the twinned signs of pentangle and girdle do not answer each other so much as destabilise the poem's appeals to a single semiotic system. Considered from a broader, historical perspective, the poem is marked by a number of rival discourses which find a specific point of focus in the political, geographical, and cultural mobility of the poem's original audience.

"What the Poet of Patience Really Did to the Book of Jonah." A good deal of accumulated scholarship postulates a wide variety of patristic sources for the Middle English Patience, and more recent studies have explored its participation in various rhetorical traditions. These findings, not compelling in themselves, can be applied to an examination of certain particular transformations the poet performs on his primary source, the Vulgate Jonah. Further comparison to tendencies in Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, beyond advancing the theory of common authorship for the poems of Cotton Nero A.x, suggests what the poet has contributed to his material, and what that tells of his inclination and outlook: he was very likely a pedagogue, certainly deeply interested in human intellectual processes, and a committed Christian figuralist, understanding learning as a moral process rather than an intellectual act, and insistent on the teleological significance of even the trivial choices of the individual.

"Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript." While the practice of examining medieval literature in its original manuscript context is always Important, it is particularly so in the case of the anonymous love lyrics of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.l.6, the "Findern Manuscript." Most of these lyrics have been classified as "courtly love lyrics," and the title many of them bear in modern anthologies and in the Index of Middle English Verse, "To his Mistress," informs us that they were written by men. But through an examination of the paleographical evidence and comparison with women's letters of the period, this article asserts that many of the lyrics were almost certainly written by women. Moreover, while the poems make use of the courtly idiom, their true nature is not "courtly" at all. They do not belong to the "game of courtly love," with its playful insincerity; they are, rather, sincere expressions of the thoughts and emotions of fifteenth-century English women living in the provinces. As such, they are not only among the first self-expressive specimens of the lyric in English; they also belong to a genre which has been held to be absent in the corpus of Middle English literature- the authentic woman's lament.

"Hermes Trismegistus, Rome, and the Myth of Europa: An Unknown Text of Giles of Viterbo." The article discusses and publishes from MS V F 14 of the Biblioteca nazionale in Naples an autograph fragment of what may be Giles's lost Liber Dialogorum. The fragment consists of a fictive dialogue between the Archangel Michael and Saint Lorenzo Maiorano of Siponto. The fragment seems to be an attempt to rework the story of the apparition of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano in the sixth century into something of a Christian Pimander, where the angel reveals divine arcana from the perspective of a Christian neoplatonist and moral reformer. A central part of these revelations is the explanation of the myth of Europa as an allegory about Italy and her corruption. Giles also develops a five stage scheme on the destiny of Rome and, in passing, has some harsh words to say about Hermes Trismegistus. Whether or not the fragment is from the Liber Dialogorum, it is certainly one of Giles's earliest writings and probably dates from his stay at Posillipo near Naples in 1499-1501.

" 'Lingua quo vadis?' Language and Community in Erasmus's Lingua." The study examines the conceptual and metaphoric structure of Lingua, setting it both in the context of contemporary criticism and in the context of renaissance humanism. The central word plays of Erasmus's work-lingua as "tongue" and "language," language itself as both poison and cure-all-turn back against themselves, and Erasmus, the word doctor who seeks to apply logotherapy, does not seem to know whether he is attacking the disease or its cure. In short, the more he inveighs against garrulity, the more garrulous he becomes. This tension between thematic statement and verbal practice, however, does not entail a deconstructive "no exit." Rather, it points to the social dimension in the renaissance theology of the word: lingua is "that which should bind" This sociology of the word, emphasizing the potentially cohesive power of language, is given voice by way of negation in Lingua. The nightmare of tongues getting away from people ultimately gives voice to Erasmus's greatest dream: a community of letters based on philological technique and the proper "regulation" of verbal dissemination.