Viator

In two MSS of the ninth century the Dicta Albini and the Dicta Candidi Presbyteri de imagine Dei are to be found fused together into a treatise named De dignitate conditionis humanae. Although the Dicta Albini, once attributed to Alcuin of York, may go back to an unknown late antique author from southern Gaul and the Dicta Candidi may have had a pupil of Alcuin for its author, their common theme unites them and testifies to the history of the conceptualization of human dignity. Both dicta have been critically edited by John Marenbon (1981) and are translated here for the first time. A hitherto-unnoticed source of the Dicta Albini in the Roman liturgy is also identified. Against the background of the study of the content of the treatise(s) it is argued that dignitas conditionis humanae is so close in meaning, systematically and linguistically, to the contemporary idea of human dignity that the treatise(s) should be read as part of the history of this idea. In fact our treatise(s) significantly influenced the thought of later ages. The considerable popularity which the material enjoyed is traced from Carolingian times down to the early Renaissance. Around 1450 an extensive excerpt from the Dicta Albini was translated into Middle English; in an appendix this version is edited from all four manuscript witnesses. All of these ramifications of the treatise(s) alert us to an often-overlooked strand in the history of the idea of human dignity.

The History of Michael Attaleiates is one of the most important sources for the study of eleventh-century Byzantium. It is representative of Byzantine efforts to come to terms with the important social and political changes that affected the empire in the course of the eleventh century. In his work Attaleiates often returned to the world of republican Rome in order to seek models of political agency that he then set up against the portraits of his contemporaries. Attaleiates’s fascination with Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paulus, and Quintus Fabius Cunctator is intriguing to modern readers of the History, but his use of republican language and democratic terminology in two accounts of violent popular political activity is evidence of an effort to explain and potentially legitimize some form of popular participation in the empire’s politics. This article examines the History’s account of two popular rebellions and argues that Attaleiates’s take on the actions of the Byzantine populace is part of a bold reassessment of the place of the empire’s urban strata in the world of Byzantine politics. Attaleiates’s “republicanism” is examined here next to the work of Psellos, Xiphilinos, Zonaras, and Anna Komnene, to reveal the depth of Byzantine engagement with republican political history and ideology.

The Old and New Testament ivory plaques known as the “Salerno Ivories” have been understood to draw on both early Christian sources and a group of related manuscripts deriving from the Cotton Genesis. But the peculiar iconography of one plaque in particular, Abraham and God at an Altar, calls this derivation into question. I argue that the scene cannot be explained solely in iconographical terms, but that it must be considered in light of the political and theological events surrounding its creation. The dramatic events of the Investiture Controversy in late eleventh-century Italy provide the context for this new interpretation. Using political and historical evidence from the period, I make a case that the monument was created by a “purposeful patron” who wished to legitimate Norman rule in southern Italy by casting the Normans as god-given rulers. The identification of the Normans and church leaders as bearers of a new “Abrahamic covenant” explains the unusual iconography of the scene.

The article examines the emergence of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki as a patron saint of crusaders, focusing on the narratives of his intervention in the Battle of Antioch (28 June 1098), one of the most important military encounters of the First Crusade. The main argument is that the inclusion of quintessentially Eastern saints such as Demetrius in the narratives of the miracle served to solidify the claim of Bohemond of Toranto to Antioch and to undermine those of the Byzantine emperor Alexius. The article also traces several other attempts to “appropriate” St. Demetrius, both in Western and in Eastern Europe, from the ninth through the fifteenth century, and attempts to explain them in the context of rivalry with Byzantium.

This article reads the medieval Welsh prose tale Branwen ferch Lŷr as a narrative of kinship relations gone wrong. Using as a critical tool Frederic Jameson’s notion of the text as a space where social contradictions can be explored and resolved on a fictive level, this reading stresses how the international politics of dynastic alliance highlight the tensions already present in families in which the kinship status of half-siblings is ambiguous and inheritance practices in flux. In contrast to the traditional “peaceweaver” model, which posits marriage alliances as a method of solving existing feuds between two peoples, this reading argues that the exogamous alliance in Branwen serves to bring out conflicts previously existing within the circle of the original family. These conflicts stem from the medieval Welsh ideology of kinship operative in Branwen, which, while purportedly protective, ultimately destroys the British royal family and their hold on power.

The kingdom of Sicily is rarely afforded a prominent place in the early development of the medieval university, and analysis of its contribution is largely dominated by the perceived peculiarities of the university of Naples, founded by Frederick II in 1224. This article reinterprets southern Italy’s contribution during the formative period of the university movement, as well as the apparent atypical characteristics of the university at Naples and its significance. It emphasizes the important role played by South Italian students and masters across Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In addition, it provides evidence for a range of commonalities between Naples and other universities, suggesting that, in the context of origins, objectives, and the nature of learning, it was not an entirely exceptional institution. The article also identifies the areas in which the university impacted internally within the kingdom of Sicily.

In this article the process of Iceland becoming a part of the kingdom in Norway is analyzed in view of internal factors which lead to the consolidation of power and the creation of territorial states in the early thirteenth century. The church brought to Iceland a new agenda through its campaign for peace and social stability, but an unintentional consequence of the separation of secular and ecclesiastical power was that some families and regional networks became stronger at the expense of others. A new elite sought territorial power but the new system was inherently unstable as the preeminent chieftains each sought to become sole ruler of the country. The nature of warfare changed, with the introduction of pitched battles and the constant harassing of farmers on a regional basis. As a result, the rule of a monarch began to seem the only guarantee for peace and stability.

Liturgical sources can be valuable resources for investigating medieval women’s spirituality. A collection of liturgical manuscripts from the Cistercian women’s abbey of Santa Maria de Vallbona in Catalonia illustrate changes in the monastery’s devotions from the mid-twelfth through the late fourteenth centuries. The offices for certain saints, notably Margaret, Katherine, and Ursula, became more elaborate during this period, suggesting their importance to the nuns. The offices for these saints show common themes, linked to the material in the common office for virgins at the monastery. These themes emphasize not only nuptial imagery from the Song of Songs, but also prudence and preparation, exemplified by the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25.1–13). Themes of prudence, preparation, and chosen status appear in all of the offices for female saints, suggesting a spiritual focus for nuns different from the image of nuns as brides of Christ.

The Muslim minority of Christian Spain is often imagined as consisting of a marginalized, rural population, a large number of slaves, and a rather narrow economic and political elite—an image which arises in part as a consequence of the narrow range of sources which are typically consulted. Through chancery registers, letters, notarial registers, and court transcripts, this article traces the history of the de Reys, a Muslim family based in the Aragonese town of Huesca, from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. The de Reys were a prosperous, but not wealthy, family that maintained its prosperity over the course of three centuries by a variety of strategies. Notable among these was the family’s tenacious struggle to maintain their exemption from communal taxes, a struggle that turned them against their own community and drove them into alliances with local Christian parties.

The image of priests as family men is contrary to the one of a lecherous, sexually promiscuous clergy so often highlighted in the works of medieval historians. Yet visitation records from fourteenth-century Catalunya show that a great number of Catalan clerics entered into marriage-like unions despite the church’s two hundred year ban on priestly marriage. Indeed, many parish clergy went to great lengths to engage in relationships that could offer them a sexual outlet, as well as a union that would create a family and household. This article explores the practice of clerical concubinage in the dioceses throughout the region of Catalunya and draws comparisons with other regions in Spain. It argues that clerical concubinage was a custom entrenched in Spanish society. Synodal decrees banning concubinage and the fines attached to them did not to deter clerics from forming long-term unions with women. Ecclesiastical officials tolerated the tradition of concubinous unions and did little to change clerical culture and practice.

This essay explores the late medieval livre de raison of Pierre Esperon, a small land-owner and legal professional from Limousin. It provides a comprehensive picture of Esperon’s lifeworld, examining his socio-economic practices and cultural outlook. It foregrounds questions about individual agency, e.g., about one’s strategies and sense of effectiveness in the world. The analysis of a memorandum written down in the livre de raison shows that the livres de raison, traditionally seen as relevant for the history of the family, could function as the locus of a discourse about the self. By comparing Esperon’s socio-economic agency with his sense of personhood, the essay illustrates the usefulness of approaching issues of subjectivity and agency in conjunction. It investigates Esperon’s conceptions about human and non-human agency, and concludes by assessing the relevance of this case study for our understanding of late medieval society, particularly in view of the renewed interest in early modernities.

Between 1898 and 1902 G. C. Macaulay produced his impressive edition of the works of John Gower. For a long time the volumes dealing with the Confessio Amantis have stood unassailable. However, in the past decades it has become ever clearer that his assumptions and deductions about the Confessio Amantis are much less solid than he and his disciple John Hurt Fisher believed. As Gower scholarship at large has continued to pay lip-service to many of his ideas, this article seeks to redress the situation by reviewing Macaulay in the light of recent thinking, which calls for due consideration of the political situation of the times and the possibility of manuscript tampering in compliance with Henry IV’s new regime. Its conclusions indicate serious errors of judgment on Macaulay’s part, including unreliable dating, faulty assumptions for his three-recension indexation of the manuscripts, and a considerable disregard of the political complexities involved.

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 4.236 is one of the five extant manuscripts containing significant portions of the Conde Lucanor by the fourteenth-century Castilian nobleman, Don Juan Manuel. Studies of BN 4.236 tend to privilege the Conde Lucanor at the expense of other texts thought to be of lesser importance. This article seeks to remove the Conde Lucanor from its position of privilege and read the manuscript as a whole book. When the texts in this manuscript are read together, certain thematic connections emerge. The article suggests that the whole book presents to the reader a discourse on virtue in theory and practice.

Gargantua and Pantagruel exists at the nexus point of four subtypes of utopia: the medieval utopia of abundance, such as The Land of Cockayne and Chaucer’s Former Age; the Renaissance utopia of the pastoral found in New World chronicles by conquistadors; the Renaissance utopia of escape such as Campanella’s City of the Sun; and the by Columbus of the utopia he found during his voyages to the New World. Because Gargantua and Pantagruel simultaneously occupies multiple utopian spaces without ever being comfortably classified as a single type of utopia, we can look outside the text for utopian satisfaction. In the persona of Master Alcofribas, Rabelais tells the reader that the boundary of his utopia was laughter brought forward by the act of reading his book. In taking Alcofribas’s advice to look outside the text for utopia, we discover that the utopia of Gargantua and Pantagruel is extra-textual, found in the act of reading and in the Bakhtinian grotesque realism of laughter.

In the philosophical system of Charles de Bovelles, figurative images play a fundamental role. These images are speculative instruments through which the philosopher unfolds his metaphysical concepts in a figurative mode. This article takes an in-depth look at three Bovillian figurative-speculative images present in De nihilo and De sapiente in order to understand the reception of Nicholas of Cusa’s thought in Bovelles’s philosophy and also to underline the fundamental differences with Giordano Bruno’s own use of Cusanus’s ideas. By looking at these differences it is possible to discover the exact historical-philosophical position of Bovelles: unlike Giordano Bruno, Bovelles did not aim at a humanistic revision of Cusanus. His thought presents a unique and brilliant philosophical crossroad of different traditions, in which we can recognize the Renaissance as a conservative memory of the heritage of medieval philosophy.

Fragments of an illuminated Anglo-Norman chronicle roll of the mid-fourteenth century, surviving as partially palimpsested flyleaves in the Princeton University Library, Garrett MS 119, offer new evidence for a northern English story about Engle and Scardyng, two legendary Britons previously known only from Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s The Story of Inglande. The article discusses this story and other incidents in the Anglo-Norman text in relation to possible sources (oral and written), late medieval English historical writing, and chronicle rolls as a form of popular literature. The article also traces the provenance of Garrett MS 119, especially in connection with Croyland Abbey and the library of the Elizabethan statesman William Cecil, Lord Burgley, and provides a transcription of the text.