Viator

"Second Language Acquisition and Anglo-Saxon Bilingualism: Negative Transfer and Avoidance in Ælfric Bata's Latin Colloquia, ca. A.D. 1000." The Anglo-Saxon Ælfric Bata authored a series of Latin colloquies around the year 1000 that arguably represent the sole evidence of spoken Latin from the pre-Conquest period. Certain idiosyncratic features of these dialogues almost certainly derive from Old English influence and can be explained by theories and observation of cross-linguistic interference found in second language acquisition research. Thus, "language transfer" explains unusual Latin constructions modeled (deliberately or not) on Old English: the use of adverb foras, double negation, and semantic shifts, among others. Furthermore, the communicative strategy of "avoidance" describes the preponderance of Latin preterit periphrastic forms with masculine or feminine direct objects. This phenomenon is likewise traceable to Old English practice. The article offers a completely new model for describing Anglo-Saxon bilingualism from the perspective of second language acquisition, closely examines the idiom of spoken Anglo-Latin, and concludes that Bata's Latin reflects a national substrate.

"The First Crusade As Reflected in the Earliest Hebrew Narrative." Recent research into the First Crusade has featured an intensive effort to understand popular crusading mores and thinking. This has meant the search for new sources that allow for circumventing the well-known Latin narratives that are deeply grounded in clerical attitudes and perspectives. While the Hebrew First Crusade narratives have long been known and have been extensively used to portray the anti-Jewish violence that broke out during the spring and summer months of 1096, these narratives have, for a variety of reasons, never been utilized for reconstructing aspects of crusading in general. Recent research into the so-called Mainz Anonymous, the briefest of the three Hebrew First Crusade narratives, has suggested that this account is quite early, composed shortly after the events of 1096, and that its author was committed to describing for his Jewish readers the genesis and development of crusading. Viewed in this way, Mainz Anonymous provides fascinating corroboration for recent findings on popular crusading, including its origins, external trappings, motivations, and rewards.

" Performative Exegesis in the Fleury Interfectio Puerorum." A music drama in the twelfth-century "Fleury Playbook" representing the Massacre of the Innocents shows the influence of the exegetical and liturgical traditions associated with the story in the gospel of Matthew and with the feast of the Innocents. In the central Middle Ages, Innocents' Day was characterized by a juxtaposition of mourning and joy: liturgical commentaries emphasize the commemoration of Rachel's grief, while the feast was the occasion for one of the clerical celebrations of the Christmas octave. The play embodies this contrast, particularly in the lengthy dialogue between the lamenting Rachel and her consolers. Rachel's lament, which is based on a sequence by Notker Balbulus, also extends the exegetical tradition by reinforcing the Marian typology inherent in the sequence. Throughout the play, the intersection of liturgical chants with newly composed material creates a complex temporality that effectively dramatizes the multiple levels of meaning in the commentary traditions.

"From Paris to Poland via the Arctic: The Origin and Transmission of a Cosmological Theory." The Polish author of the short mid-thirteenth-century geographical tractate called De ortu Tartaronum (or Descripciones terranum) reported that a Danish acquaintance had told him of a miraculous "superterranean dawn" which in midwinter darkness illuminated the Arctic sky of northern Norway. A source analysis of this Dane's account reveals him to have been a well-read man with possible connections to the schools of Paris. An unexpected result of this analysis is the discovery that he had also read the Old Norse Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror), which contains a description of the northern lights and theories about their origin whose formulation is also traceable to the studies of "well-informed men" at Paris. The examination of these theories opens knowledge about yet another area of physics which was being scrutinized by twelfth-century scholars and provides clues about the identity of the Dane who communicated particulars about the object of their interest to his Polish associate.

"Gerald of Wales and the Fourth Lateran Council," Gerald's Speculum Ecdesiae has seemed to be "a compendium, lacking form or structure, of derogatory anecdotes" about the failings of Benedictine and Cistercian monks; it is usually dated circa 1220, or at the earliest 1216, The present paper suggests that Gerald gave the work its present form on the eve of Lateran IV as an appeal for certain reforms, namely closer supervision of monastic orders, especially the Benedictines, and the provision of a regular income for the Roman curia by assigning it the income from one benefice in every cathedral, Originally Gerald had set out to compile a collection of instances of monastic laxity; for over twenty years he had collected materials and in 1212 he began to arrange them in three distinctions. But when Lateran IV was summoned in April 1213, Gerald restructured his work by adding a fourth distinction that had his twofold reform program as its centerpiece (chapter 19). By the spring of 1215, the Speculum Ecdesiae as we know it was substantially complete; and in September he presented a copy to Stephen Langton, to whom the work was dedicated, several weeks before the archbishop set out for the council. Subsequently Gerald twice updated the Speculum by making small but specific additions: in 1216 he noted how his proposals had fared at the council; and before his death circa 1223, he also added a reference to the 1220 bull Super speculum.

"Byzantium's Initial Encounter with the Chinggisids : An Introduction to the Byzantino-Mongolic." The revival of Byzantine civilization in Anatolian exile after the brutal sack (halosis) of Constantinople by the Venetian-led Fourth Crusade in 1204 coincided with the approach of the Mongol storm toward western Eurasia during the reign of the Anatolian-Byzantine basileus John III Ducas Vatatzes, 1222-1254. Heir of a proud millenarian tradition of Byzantine diplomacy, John III skillfully synchronized his military initiatives to restore the Byzantine world (oecumene) in both Asia Minor and the Balkans so that those initiatives coincided with the periodic ebbing of Mongol pressure in Western Eurasia. Meanwhile, Vatatzes adroitly took advantage of his neighbors' preoccupation with Mongol advances against their frontiers, effectively utilizing his advantageous interior strategic position-shielded by buffers in both the Balkans and Asia Minor from direct nomadic assault-to expand his imperial domain (basileion) at the expense of his regional rivals. As the Mongol storm drew ever closer, John III and his successor Theodore II Lascaris, 1254-1258, undertook conciliatory diplomacy with the Chinggisid princes and marshals (noyans) to exploit Byzantium’s geopolitical advantages and deflect Mongol imperialism elsewhere, laying the foundation for later Palaeologan initiatives that successfully continued Byzantium’s collaboration with the Mongols well into the fourteenth century and prolonged the life of their waning basileion.

"Foundresses of the Franciscan Life: Umiliana Cerchi and Margaret of Cortona," This article examines the earliest vitae of Blessed Umiliana of Cerchi (1219-1246) and Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297), two Franciscan penitents from Tuscany. In an era when many Friars Minor resisted any official relationship between themselves and lay penitents, the authors of these vitae argued that such penitents might be legitimately incorporated into a lay branch of the Franciscan order. Both women were offered by their hagiographers, therefore, not only as models of the penitential life and examples of a new form of feminine sanctity, but as foundresses and patronesses of the Franciscan Third Order.

On the Usefulness of Music: Motion, Music, and the Thirteenth-Century Reception 'of Aristotle's Physics." Nothing, Augustine had said, can be understood without music. Medieval education, culminating in the formation of the university within the early years of the thirteenth century, took Augustine at his word. Music, an analogy discipline within the material, measurable, mathematical sciences, was the "ministry" discipline, on hand within the sciences for the express purpose of making obscure things manifest. Music, the science that made concepts plain, had brought out the essential component of every philosophical discussion for several hundred years by the time Robert Grosseteste, for example, explained revolutionary new concepts of nature, material, and motion in the early thirteenth century. This study presents the key principle, set forth as most important by Aristotle in the Physics, that is, the concept of theoria, translated into the Latin ductus and the early commentary treatments of this principle by Philip the Chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon; and shows how music, indeed, was essential to the understanding of this principle, the example of the conductus.

"The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani and His Italian Followers." This article examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly efforts to recover the vast corpus of eyewitness accounts of the siege and fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, focusing on one specific letter by Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani of Chios. Leonardo's Italian translation, included in Francesco Sansovino's best-sellers of the sixteenth century, was followed by well-known elaboraters and forgers such as pseudo-Sphrantzes (who "composed" the celebrated Chronicon Maius) and the anonymous author of the codex Barberinus Graecus 111. The relation between Leonardo's text and that of Giacomo Languschi (embedded in Zorzi Dolfin's Chronicle) are examined; linguistic parallels further demonstrate that Leonardo, Languschi, and an epic poem on the siege by another eyewitness, Ubertino Pusculo, are more closely connected than has been suspected. These texts utilized another lost source, which I attribute to Ignotus, an unknown author. He may be none other than Alvise Diedo, the "capitano general del mar" of the Venetians in Constantinople, who escaped the carnage, returned to Venice, and eventually produced a relazione of the events. His lost relazione and the narrative of Leonardo played a key role among the early attempts to reconstruct the history of the siege of Constantinople (1453).

A London Anchorite, Simon Appulby: His Fruyte of Redempcyon and Its Milieu." Simon Appulby was the last anchorite of the London parish of Allhallows London Wall. His popular work The Fruyte of Redempcyon, which appeared in five editions between 1514 and 1532, was a translation of a series of Latin meditations on Christ's life. A condensed version was published in a popular handbook of prayers, the Antidotarius Animae (1489) and this version was Appulby's source. Fruyte received formal episcopal approval from Bishop of London Richard Fitzjames and hence might be considered the product of a conservative attempt to make scripture available in English, in approved forms. It utilized Bridgettine material as well, suggesting contact with Syon Abbey. Appulby appears in the will of another priest, Sir John Gaunt, whose interests and connections illuminate Appulby's. Both men remembered the neighborhood institutions of the comer of London and both were connected with the book trade. (Gaunt may have been the owner of a 'common profit" manuscript and of a manuscript of the stanzaic Morte Arthur.) Appulby's financial support was important to Allhallows; his 1537 will shows his ties to parish and neighborhood. His book, Fruyte of Redempcyon, represents an orthodox attempt to provide scriptural access in popular form just before the Dissolution.

""La Poésie du Ciel" in Montaigne's "Apologie de Raimond Sebond”" Throughout Montaigne's "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," which Stages a lengthy attack upon human reason's hubristic pretensions to understand our physical and mental universe, the author traces the text's marked penchant for imagery and examples arising from the astronomical and astrological domains, He brands this persistent concern for the fabric of the heavens "la poésie du ciel," and he demonstrates how the essayist emphasized the "poietic" or factitious nature of these human descriptions of the skies, Citations from Latin poetry (Manilius) and from contemporary French verse (Ronsard) function as a central vehicle for the inscription of the paradigmatic "poésie du ciel" in the "Apologie." Progressively, the sun comes to occupy a crucial place in the essay's repeated glances towards the skies, Montaigne's fascination with solar themes is underlined by his reference to Copernicus's 1543 De revolutionibus orbiun caelestium. The author discusses Montaigne's view of this treatise as an essentially literary event and as a salient manifestation, among many others, of astronomical "poiesis."

“On Not Eating Polish Bread in Vain: Resonance and Conjuncture in the Deeds of the Princes of Poland (1109-1113)” This article argues that the Deeds of the Princes of Poland, composed between 1109 and 1113 to celebrate the deeds of Boleslaw III (1102-1138) and of his dynasty, belongs to a class of princely histories and genealogies of the twelfth century. The author shows how the text draws on comparable writings and themes from western lands, the homeland of the author, while responding to the more immediate circumstances of a Polish prince mobilizing and fighting both defensively and aggressively. Moreover, the Polish example points with unusual clarity to the factors of dynastic setback and "feudal revolution" in defining the righteous cause that motivated a resurgent Poland in the early twelfth century. The Dads are an outstanding example of dynastic celebration in the great age of princely power.

“The Holy Emperor Henry "the First" As One of the Dragon's Heads of Apocalypse: On the Image of the Roman Empire under German Rule in the Tradition of Joachim of Fiore." The article reflects on the Strange fact that the holy emperor Henry "the First" figures as one of the seven heads of the apocalyptic dragon in the work of the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore. The author tries to show what meaning this representation has in Joachim's thinking concerning Henry as a person and the Roman-German Empire as an institution. In a second step, the tradition originating with Joachim- Petrus Johannis Olivi, Jean de Roquetaillade, and pseudo-joachimist writings- is surveyed with respect to the use of the dragon's head motive. In addition to the function of this theme within Joachim's historico-eschatological concept, one can point out as a main result the interrelationship between the actual political role of the Empire and the importance an author gave to that theme.

"Professing Religion: From Liturgy to Law“. This paper traces the "juridification" of an act that was paradigmatic for medieval society, the professing of religion. From the beginnings into the twelfth century, joining a religious house was primarily a ritual act of quasi-sacramental importance. It was irrevocable, even when, as often, parents arranged it for their children, offered up to a saint as oblates. Canon lawyers became involved in the twelfth century on essentially two fronts: sewing contested cases of profession (usually when individuals wished to leave), and determining the binding quality of child oblation. Without openly disparaging the ritual acts, the lawyers insisted upon an act of willed and present consent by an adult who chose to join a house or a child upon reaching the age of majority (initially twelve for girls and fourteen for boys). The decisive legal language, effectively hollowing out the received ritual traditions, came from a decretal letter addressed by Pope Innocent III to Joachim of Fiore. In working out this legal paradigm the lawyers took over their understanding that marriage was constituted by willed and present consent. Thus the legal paradigm worked out for the "married" estate in this case shaped that applied to the estate of the religious.

"Cleansing on Consciences: Some Observations regarding the Fifteenth-Century Registers of the Papal Penitentiary." This article presents a summary analysis of the registers of the office of the papal Penitentiary during the pontificate of Pope Pius II. It explains the origins of the fifteenth-century Penitentiary, its personnel and administrative structure, and it sets out how and why people from all over Europe brought their cases before this papal office. The reasons for the rare direct involvement of the pope himself in the business of the Penitentiary are discussed, as well as the financial aspects of the applications to the Penitentiary. This article then proceeds to analyze some aspects of the 3540 entries in the registers of the Penitentiary between 1458 and 1464 which concerned petitions from the German-speaking countries. Closer attention is given to the following types of cases, which the Penitentiary dealt with most frequently: marriage dispensations, homicide and murder, impediments to ordination, and confessional privileges.

"Time and Eternity in the Eschatology of the Guennol Triptych," The paper investigates the symbolic and scholastic semantics underlying a distinct group of enamel triptychs originating in the Mosan-Rhenish region between 1160 and 1175, concentrating on the so-called Guennol triptych, conserved at the cloisters, It represents the Last Judgment in a very unusual way, without judge, without court, without terror, but with a splinter of the holy cross as the sign of the Son of man, thus actualizing the imminence of the Last Judgment. The texts exactly describing the elements of this astonishing setting are identified as distinctions 45-49 of the fourth book of Lombard's Sentences.

"The Place of the Crusader in Medieval Society." This article is concerned with how crusaders and members of the military orders fitted into the theoretical framework of medieval society. They were neither monks, clerics, or laymen nor were they prayers, fighters, or workers. Like some other new categories in twelfth-century society, including the ministerials and lay brothers, the crusaders shared the characteristics of more than one of the traditional orders and could be seen (as Bernard of Clairvaux said of the Templars) both as monks and laymen and as prayers and fighters. Like pilgrims, they were cut off, at least temporarily, from other members of society by their vows and consecrated status, which was guaranteed by privileges granted by the papacy. The military orders were regarded by contemporaries as religious orders whose members substituted fighting for God against the enemies of the church for the opus Dei of monks and canons. Scholars disagree whether they should be seen as permanent crusaders or as another new and distinct type of life.