Viator

It is argued that the specific portrayal of the Holy Grail as a miraculous gemstone, first found in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, was ultimately inspired by the concept of the cintāmani or “wish-granting jewel” in the literature of India. Traditions regarding this object were popular in Buddhist folklore and parallels with the Grail literature are drawn from Japan, Indonesia, Śrī Lankā, and especially Tibet. Lha Thothori Nyentsen, king of Tibet, is identified as a plausible model for Titurel, the Fisher King. Parallels drawn from the legendary biography and the extant allegorical writings of Padmasambhava, a Gnostic, alchemist and warrior-monk revered as the principal founder of Tibetan Buddhism, extend to the entire core narrative of Parzival’s quest. It is suggested that these traditions reached medieval literati as a part of the astronomical, astrological, and alchemical corpus that was conveyed from India to Baghdād by Kanaka, translated into Arabic by Māshā’allāh, and rendered into Hebrew by Abraham ibn ‘Ezra.

The Liber Testamentorum, a twelfth-century cartulary produced by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, is distinctive for its elaborate cycle of miniatures depicting the kings and queens of Asturias and Castilla-León. Produced to influence and impress Queen Urraca, ruling Castilla-León in her own right at the time, they show kings with traditional insignia of power and military strength, and queens with objects associated with religious life and practice, like haloes, Psalters, and chalices. Interpreted in the light of the discussion of sacred kingship in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The Kings Two Bodies, this article suggests these images show not the king himself with two bodies, secular and spiritual, human and Christ-like, but rather the spiritual and secular functions literally divided between two bodies, those of the king and queen, with the king in change of protection and the queen responsible for prayer for the kingdom.

There is general agreement that a turning point was reached in terms of medieval views of how political structures ought to be organized in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This period, it is suggested, witnessed enthusiasm for concepts of universalism decline and the emergence in western Europe of the idea of the autonomous “nation-state.” This article examines how a series of attempts by the Capetian rulers of France to obtain control of the western Empire in this period should be understood. Traditionally, these French imperial candidatures are explained in the context of an emerging French state: they are considered an opportunistic attempt to gain land and influence during the period of imperial weakness that followed the death of the Emperor Frederick II. In reassessing why the candidatures took place and establishing, in particular, their connection with Capetian views of the crusade movement, this article highlights a need to question the generally accepted narrative of state formation.

In recent years a number of writers have claimed that, although the Templars were not heretics or apostates, abuses—such as denial of Christ and spitting on the cross—did take place at Templar admission ceremonies. These have been seen variously as tests of obedience or of courage, a form of bonding or horseplay, and an unwitting borrowing from Islam. The present article examines critically the arguments which have been advanced by those who assert that certain malpractices occurred either widely or in a minority of Templar houses when recruits were admitted, and it also considers the explanations put forward for abuses. The conclusion drawn is that a convincing case has not been made, and that there are stronger reasons for maintaining that abuses did not happen.

Guillaume de Machaut’s Prologue, like many of his other works, is indebted to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, both in its form (a prosimetrum) and in its themes (e.g., the election of a male figure and the presentation to him of a task). Machaut’s account of the genesis of his work—which centers on the notion of the fusion of form and matter and conformance to an exemplar—is also influenced by Neoplatonist theories of Creation associated with the School of Chartres. Both intertexts impute a cosmological and philosophical purview to poetry adumbrated but not explicitly theorized in encyclopedic texts such as the Roman de la rose.

This article focuses on the dialogic form of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, and argues that the text’s structure represents the transitory nature of experiences of mystical union. The dialogue is one means for Marguerite to circumvent the problem of inexpressibility, a tension that emerges in the text as the allegorical personification of Soul both proclaims her union with God and critiques her own speech for its inadequacy. As the text alternates between distinguishing Soul’s voice and commingling it with others in the dialogue—including allegorical representations of God—it portrays the union possible between God and a soul, a union necessarily incomplete as long as the soul remains in mortal life. Analysis of the Middle English text of the Mirror and the commentary of its translator, M.N., is particularly useful for highlighting these dynamics, and also suggests M.N.’s recognition of them.

Because Usk was executed as a self-serving traitor, his biography has encouraged readings that blame the Testament of Love’s textual vagaries on its author’s ulterior motives which seem incongruous with his choice of the Boethian Consolatio genre. Broadening “Boethian” to include Boethius’s logical works, however, reveals that Usk based his textual strategies on long-standing and respectable conventions of logical plausibility dating back to Aristotle and Cicero and widely used throughout scholastic disputation. Using these logical “Topics” to validate the discussion between Love and the narrator, Usk seeks to transfer validity from the text’s arguments to himself, the author, and recuperate his character. In doing so, he develops a pioneering English philosophical vocabulary, similar to that of Langland and the Lollards. Identification of Usk’s logical strategies provides insight into Usk’s audience, education, and milieu, and suggests that Usk may be fruitfully considered according to contemporary fourteenth-century discourses of truth, public service, and vernacular philosophy.

This article uses “The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband,” a late fifteenth-century text that associates men with the outdoors and women with the home and the domestic, as a springboard for a comparative analysis of rural and urban housing to explore questions concerning the gender division of space over the course of the English later Middle Ages. The article questions the value of rigid models of gender difference that both normative texts and numbers of modern scholars propose. Drawing upon extant late medieval probate inventories and archaeological evidence, it explores rather different cultural norms between peasant and bourgeois society as reflected in the physical fabric and furnishings of homes. It further considers differences between different levels of society and over time. The article advocates an interdisciplinary methodology and the exploitation of narrative sources, literary or otherwise, to interrogate social practice and the meanings of space.

This article offers a narratological and stylistic analysis of three Burgundian chroniclers whose works have hitherto been neglected by scholars of late medieval French literature. I argue that there is far more individuality across these texts than has previously been recognized by modern critics and show how each author’s particular conception of his role as a historian determined his narrative style, one which varied according to whether he saw himself primarily as a compiler of sources, an eye-witness, or a moralist. As a complement to an historical approach which would analyze these narratives in the context of the particular historical circumstances in which they were produced and of the political allegiances of the authors and their patrons, an appreciation of the specific narrative and stylistic strategies which these chroniclers adopted in order to persuade their readers of the veracity of their accounts allows a deeper understanding of how these texts functioned as political literature.

The Winchester Malory, the sole extant manuscript of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, contains a series of marginal notes in the hands of the main scribes. These notes mark the position of particular events in the text, and by examining which events have been marked, it is possible to determine what one contemporary (whether author, reader or scribe) found worthy of notice: the martial, and, to a lesser but still important degree, the marvelous. Rather than providing practical full-manuscript finding aids, the notes act as a guide to illuminate the narrative structure of some subsidiary episodes or tales. Clearly both produced and intended to be read during the process of working through the text, they set forward a simplified, causal plot in the Balin, a tightly-structured series of combats against colored opponents in the Tale of Sir Gareth, and the progress of a marvelous but still secular chivalry in the Sankgreal.

The English Rous Roll, British Library MS Additional 48976, shows its maker’s deep interest in the built space of Warwick. Material objects, place names, and, even more so, buildings are for John Rous the tokens of history, monuments to past virtue, vehicles for aligning the examples of the past with the concerns of the present. His many references to building and buildings in the English Rous Roll have a twofold purpose: they create a pattern of virtue in which builders are always great men, and great men are builders; and, even more importantly, they position Warwick centrally within English history, so that—in the turbulent period after Richard Neville the Kingmaker’s death, when the fate of the earldom of Warwick was painfully uncertain—the building up of Warwick could be equated with the building up of England.

The Visitation altarpiece (Louvre, Paris) by Domenico Ghirlandaio has been previously examined as a work in the artist’s oeuvre, and as one of the paintings adorning Santa Maria Maddalena di Cestello (today called Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi) in late fifteenth-century Florence. It has not been recognized as one of the few funerary altarpieces that commemorate a young patrician woman in Renaissance Florence. While funerary objects for men have been extensively studied, little work has been done on art objects remembering women. Commissioned by Lorenzo Tornabuoni, son of the Medici banker Giovanni Tornabuoni, the altarpiece graced the memorial chapel he founded in honor of his first wife, Giovanna degli Albizzi, who died while still with child. Examining the Visitation via the religious narratives depicted and Giovanna’s biography, this article demonstrates that the altarpiece focuses on themes of importance to married Renaissance women, namely, fertility and childbirth, as well as death and the hope for life after death for those women who died while performing their reproductive duties, a common occurrence in late Quattrocento Florence.

This article explores the vulnerabilities and ambiguities of widowhood in late medieval noble society through the example of Isabel Cornell, a member of the aristocracy of the Crown of Aragon. Isabel was a beautiful and wealthy woman who had been left a widow at a young age and, as a consequence, was an object of pursuit by the noblemen of the realm. One of these, a cousin, composed a substantial poem elegizing both her physical attractions and her moral purity. Isabel, however, was faced with a dilemma, in that were she to remarry she would lose control over her former husband’s patrimony and her influence over and custody of her own son. As a consequence it seems that she may have been driven to take matters into her own hands, carrying out a clandestine affair with at least one if not two noblemen. At least this is how the indictment reads—a deposition in which her own slave girls testified at having caught her in flagrante. While the outcome of the case is unknown, it brings into relief the moral double-standard of the day, in which the adulterous affairs of men were regarded as inconsequential, whereas the adulterous affairs of women became matters of public and legal record and could have life-shattering repercussions. It also highlights the contrast between contemporary moral ideals and actual behavior and between literary representations of widowhood and real-life social dynamics that both informed and defied them.

The Reformation of the 1520s is generally seen as the first major large-scale media campaign. The pamphlet has been especially touted as a vehicle for persuasion. However, seeing print as necessary for a mass campaign of any kind distorts our understanding of communication in centuries prior to the Reformation. Between 1415 and 1420, Hussite leaders launched a large-scale propaganda campaign in an effort to persuade the laity of their message. The movement relied on vernacular songs, so-called “oral pamphlets” instructing the laity in the Hussite message. Topics ranged from John Hus, simony, and anti-clericalism to the chalice and salvation. The Catholic party composed their own songs, mostly satirizing the reformers. The success of the Hussite movement should be attributed to a savvy propaganda campaign on the part of its leaders, a campaign which successfully incorporated concerns, fears, hopes, needs, and wants that already existed among the laity.