Viator

This study examines the book culture of late antique Gaul at the time of transition from Gallo-Roman to Frankish society. It highlights the interplay between the political, military, social and cultural factors which gradually transformed the habits of writing, reading and circulating books. A close reading of fifth-century letter-collections reveals a vivid interest in books as transmitters of classical values and as opportunities to reinforce the ties of amicitia. Aristocratic mores and rules dominated book production and reception, which took place predominantly in the aristocratic villae. In the sixth century, books were almost exclusively produced in a religious setting. Surviving sources from this time period (histories, poetry, sermons, saints’ vitae) suggest that changes in the modes of literary production were complemented by new meanings attached to books, which became primary vehicles for expressing identification with Christian ideals. Participation in any or all stages of book production nourished the quest for spiritual perfection, while books themselves were imbued with miraculous properties and venerated as holy objects.

The article discusses changes in the form and function of public opinion, moving from the ninth-century conceptualization of public opinion as an abstract entity that was only hazily connected to politics to the twelfth-century notion of public opinion as a political force. This process - the “politicization of public opinion” - was in some ways related to the emergence of public spheres (Teilöffentlichkeiten) as more or less clearly defined institutional confines for the manifestation of public opinion. In other ways, however, this “politicization” was also connected to the establishment of “private” and “public” spheres, not least to their changing configurations. Moreover, the politicization of public opinion, along with the establishment of public spheres, created the potential for public debate - debate that was circumscribed by concern for status and symbolic means, but that still gave dialogue and the use of argument a more prominent place.

Focusing on the charter that contains the first sentence of written Italian, this article explores the return of the Monastery of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino to the Liri valley after seventy years of exile. Central to this homecoming was a legal dispute with the nearest neighbors of the monastery over a large piece of property. During the court case, the monks supported their claim to the lands with the oaths of witnesses rather than the display of documents. The performance of oaths by witnesses conformed to southern Italian norms about legal proof as well as alluded to a body of religious literature about persecution of holy men by secular authorities. The second half of the article discusses the possible afterlife of the charter as a script for future performances as well as the end of this conflict with a second performance and a donation of the land to Monte Cassino.

Animals were an essential component of medieval life and pervaded contemporary art and literature, but specific reasons for their presence in historical narratives are not often investigated. Livestock and beasts of burden had an important logistical role in the crusades, but animals also appeared in a symbolic context, especially those deemed to be “wild.” Preachers of the crusade and authors of historical narratives used these creatures to communicate with their audiences, to enshrine crusading as part of God’s divine plan and to differentiate crusaders from their enemies. Encounters with wild animals also featured as part of the penitential aspects of crusading. Case studies involving Wicher the Swabian and Godfrey of Bouillon demonstrate how crusade authors blended fact and fiction, and adjusted elements of certain micro-narratives in order to elevate the reputations of individual crusaders. Animals and the natural world provided a symbolic code which enabled authors to demonstrate their learning and to communicate crusading ideas and events.

The poem of Baudri of Bourgueil for Countess Adèle may correspond to several different literary genres but it is mainly a definition of the link between writing and the creation of the work of art, in so far as the poesis seems to assume a pure genetic function able to handle the mutation of the idea to the ideal. In this poem, a complex interplay occurs between what is seen, what is described and what is created in the development of the poem. Probably more than any of Baudri’s other creations, the poem for the Countess Adèle subordinates writing to image to create an imago that blurs the distinctions between written construction and visual construction, in an aesthetic principle of balance and harmony that stands more on the side of musical production than any ordinary historical or encyclopedic reality.

Medieval Latin bestiaries from the very moment of their formation incorporated excerpts from many different sources. Most of these additions have been discussed in the scholarly literature, but not the excerpts from the Policraticus, the text written by Thomas Becket’s secretary John of Salisbury in 1159. The excerpts, which are anecdotal in nature, appear in Third Family bestiaries written in the diocese of Lincoln at the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the circle of the famous teacher and theologian William de Montibus. It is surprising that the author of the bestiary would choose anecdotes from the Policraticus, whose main subject is what we now would call political science and social relationships. This article is devoted to the functions of the Policraticus in the bestiaries, as well as to the reasons the author of the Third Family bestiary archetype chose to use it as a source.

The mosaic of Christ crowning Roger II of Sicily in the church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, Palermo has long been recognized for its Byzantine influence. While acknowledging this debt, this article calls attention to a little-discussed western influence - the fleurs-de-lis on the king’s robe - and argues that although the mosaic borrowed heavily from Byzantine imperial iconography, the inclusion of lilies was meant to emphasize Roger’s French connections. This study discusses the growing significance of the flower among the Capetian kings (particularly Louis VII) and investigates the broader historical context that includes the rise of the French monarchy, the development of the French state, and the nature of French identity in the twelfth century to explain why Roger would have been interested in cultivating his connections to France. In so doing, the article attempts to realign Roger with his western roots, which at times have been overlooked in favor of the exotic elements of his kingdom.

While different facets of charisma in medieval culture were studied by researchers who applied Weberian theory and terminology, the fact that there was also a medieval concept of charisma (Donum), grounded in 1 Corinthians 12, as was Weber’s, has remained ignored. The present essay traces the appearance of a concept of grace that does not make one worthy to the scholastic theology of the early thirteenth century. It analyses contemporary discussions over the moral status of the habitus of prophecy, in which a new understanding of the supernatural as detached from the moral sphere appears; demonstrates the emergence of the new category of non-gratifying grace and reveals the prominence of knowledge and edification in it. Several suggestions as to the cultural context of this process are then proposed: new forms of charismatic preaching, crisis of charisma in the nascent university, and papal and mendicant advocation of a perception of gifts of knowledge as actively engaged in socially beneficial activities.

Luke 22.44, in which Jesus’s “sweat became as drops of blood,” generated significant thirteenth-century discussion. Unlike pre- and early-Scholastic texts that treated the bloody sweat as miraculous, numerous Scholastic theologians, under the influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy, reconsidered its physiological implications. Since Aristotle had attributed a bloody sweat to a poor humoral complexion, they acknowledged that a bloody sweat is natural, albeit ordinarily a sign of illness and a bad complexion. This forced them to struggle, however, to reconcile Aristotle with other traditions that identified Jesus as possessing the most noble and perfect complexion. For Albert the Great, John Pecham, and Roger Marston Jesus’s subtle complexion produced such intense sadness and pain when anticipating the Passion that it produced bloody sweat as a concomitant change in the body. This solution contributes to the affective piety of the later Middle Ages, which intensified the emphasis upon Christ’s suffering in the Passion.

Focusing on neglected evidence concerning Benoit d’Alignan and Thomas Agni’s activities in Outremer, this article sheds light on the question of whether the Latin presence in the Levant contributed to Western acquaintance with Oriental Christianities. It shows that Benoit’s Tractatus super erroribus includes information regarding Oriental Christian beliefs and practices which must have been collected during its author’s two sojourns in Outremer. Thomas, to whom Benoit dedicated a copy of his Tractatus, employed various means, such as debate, imprisonment, and interrogation, in order to deepen and widen his church’s knowledge of Oriental Christianities. The harsh and systematic approach which characterized both Benoit’s and Thomas’s activities is probably related to contemporary changes in the West with regard to the attitude toward heretics, and, specifically, to the beginnings of the inquisition. Given the power both men wielded within Frankish society, it is almost certain that their ideas and actions in this field had a considerable effect on Outremer’s culture.

This article engages with the work of Antoine Dondaine on inquisitors’ manuals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which laid the groundwork for modern scholarship on these texts. While following Dondaine’s line on the texts’ importance to the development of the inquisition of heresy, it questions the emphasis that his reading put on their literary development, and the subsequent tendency by scholars to read these texts as driven by generic concerns. The article surveys thirteen manuals from the high medieval period, produced between 1248 and 1330. The textual exchange that exists between the manuals and across different regions of inquisition and the relationship of the texts to the developing practice of the inquisition of heresy are explored. It is suggested that the typological reading of manuals be set aside, and that changes in their form are more helpfully understood in terms of their practical function.

This article illuminates the role played by Sicilian cities in state building in the late Middle Ages through their involvement in the intense process of negotiations between the king and his subjects. This study heads in the opposite direction of the interpretations that negate the existence of municipal freedom and allege the existence of an exclusively top-down model of power relationships between king and kingdom. The focus is on one of the main royal officials in local government - the capitaneus or captain, who was intended to be the king’s instrument of control. The captain gradually came to represent the municipal will and his role was defined by decision-making interaction between the king and local governments. The dynamics surrounding the captaincy go well beyond the local sphere and will lead us to address the positive effects of the encounter of various political traditions in the Crown of Aragon. This in turn, made the establishment of new political balances possible, which had a crucial role in government building in Sicily.

The following study examines the reception in Bohemia of the belief that St. Jerome was a Slav, the author of the Roman Slavonic rite, and the creator of the Glagolitic alphabet. This legend developed in thirteenth-century Dalmatia in the Glagolite monasteries that observed the Roman rite in the Slavonic language. (In reality, the Glagolitic alphabet was created by the Byzantine scholar Constantine-Cyril as a part of his mission to Great Moravia in the 860s.) In 1347-1348 this belief was brought to Prague when Charles IV founded the Slavonic Monastery of St. Jerome for the Croatian Glagolites. The article examines the role of this foundation in Charles’s political showmanship, as well as its impact on Slavonic and Czech literary culture in Bohemia. Further, the article discusses the evidence that the legend of Slavic Jerome spread beyond the walls of the Slavonic Monastery in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries.

Among the various areas of production and the numerous categories of fine glazed pottery in the Iberian peninsula, the study focuses on the monochrome blue (also known as loza azul) and on the lusterware (or loza dorada) pottery of the production centers in the Valencia region. It assembles the related evidence for the presence of these categories in regions of Greece during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, on which no such study had previously been undertaken, and addresses questions regarding the network of trade routes via which pottery from the Valencia region reached areas of Greece, which either formed part of the Byzantine empire or were under Latin rule.

As a result of Sheila Delany’s studies some years ago, the fifteenth-century poet-friar Osbern Bokenham has long been considered a partisan of Richard, duke of York. Delany’s and other studies, however, had not fully considered the role that ecclesiastical clientage and Bokenham’s role as an Augustinian Friar played in his Yorkist writings. Richard was the hereditary patron of Clare Priory, Bokenham’s house, and this article reconsiders the evidence for the relationship between poet and ecclesiastical patron, reading Bokenham’s pro-Yorkist writings as an attempt to improve Clare’s economic and social position by attracting benefactions from an otherwise-distant hereditary patron and in turn enhancing Clare Priory’s spiritual and social prestige. Key to this reassessment are not only Bokenham’s well known poetry but also the Clare “Dialogue at the Grave,” priory charters, Bokenham’s Mappula Angliae, and his Abbotsford Legendary.

Although interception has long been recognized as having played a disruptive role in Renaissance diplomatic communications, little systematic attention has been paid to its mechanisms or consequences for the interpretation of early modern letters or diplomatic papers. This article examines the interception of a set of letters sent by nuncio Girolamo Rorario (1485-1551) to his curial colleagues as well as to his mistress during his 1535 nunciature to Hungary. The letters’ interception enables them to be read for not only their memorialist qualities but also for the rhetorical strategies which diplomats such as Rorario employed to transmit information or maintain personal ties, as well as to negotiate complicated, even contradictory commissions, loyalties, and patronage relations. In cautioning historians against reading diplomatic reports as unembroidered reporting of factual events, the Rorario letters also suggest the value of intercepted correspondence for a broader conception of early modern diplomacy, letter-writing, and rhetoric.