Viator

From the early fourth century onwards Christian legends and apocrypha elaborate on the biblical miracle story of the Woman with the Flow of Blood or the “Haemorrhoissa” (Mark 5.24b-34) and connect it to an image of Christ, initially rendered in a sculpture group. This article contends that the notion of the “hem” of Christ’s sculptural garment in those legends and apocrypha - mimicking the hem in the original biblical miracle story as described in Luke and Matthew - already contained the quintessential image-paradigmatic content that eventually constituted the medieval “Veronica.” It contends that this notion of the “hem” hence served as an early Christian conceptual “portal” to the Christian holy icon and to Christian visual culture at large, and therefore excavates the complex cultural matrix that underlay this early Christian notion of the “hem” (of Christ’s garment) and reveals its continuing resonance into this medieval image paradigm.

This essay begins with a discussion of a sixth-century Gothic Bible fragment unearthed in Antinoë, Egypt. It argues that a group of barbarians who took lucrative positions as private troops most likely transported the book to Egypt. Procopius, in particular, provides ample evidence for barbarian redeployment across the Mediterranean. This hypothesis is further supported by contemporaneous papyri which reference a Gothic detachment on the Apion family estate in Oxyrhynchus as well as the presence of other barbarians, including Franks, in Egypt around the age of Justinian. These small communities had close relations with the landed elite, were marked by their group identity, and possibly retained their own clergy. Ultimately, the essay asks early medievalists to take a Mediterranean-wide perspective in their narration of barbarian history.

In the seventh century three historical works were apparently commissioned by the Lombard kings of Italy: the Short History of Secundus of Trento, a Continuation of Prosper of Aquitania until 625, and the Origins of the Lombard People. These three sources grant us with the opportunity to investigate the evolution of the Lombard self-representation in an age of conflict and shifting balances. While the first two, written in the age of Theodelinda (584-626), read Lombard history as part of the grand narrative of Christianity’s triumph, the Origins of the Lombard People bears clues to the reaction taking place during the reigns of Arioald (626-636) and Rothari (636-654). The barbarian and harsh tone of the narrative represent an ideological tool deployed to re-style the Lombard identity and self-representation in a moment of conflict against the empire.

It is a commonplace that the Viking invaders looted and torched churches and monasteries in their raids on the Continent, but this article examines the behavior of the Christian Franks during that same period, investigating whether respect for the Church’s sanctity caused them to behave any differently. In an important article in the 1960s A. T. Lucas showed that church plundering and burning was a regular part of internecine Irish warfare, but was that also the case on the Continent? Careful and critical study of the contemporary sources reveals that churches and monasteries were the target of Frankish thieves and robbers from all levels of society, and highlights the many forms of the Church’s wealth which motivated such thefts. At the same time the fact that the Franks did not take slaves and rarely burned churches helps to explain why the Scandinavian attacks provoked such horror among contemporary clerical writers.

This article presents a new hypothesis related to the very earliest filtration of Arabic science to the Latin World during the tenth century. Contrary to the beliefs of current scholarship, it argues that the very earliest Latin astronomical texts derived from Arabic sources cannot be considered to be related to the written tradition of the mathematical school of Maslama al-Majrīṭī nor can they be regarded as translations from Arabic. It contends that these texts derive from a non-written Arabic tradition of practical astronomy that existed in al-Andalus before the time of Maslama. It offers new evidence supporting the thesis that such a tradition existed, and argues that traces of it can also be detected in the teaching of Gerbert of Aurillac, as described by Richer of Reims. It concludes with an alternative explanation of the very earliest filtration of Arabic science to the Latin World and a new reconstruction of the stages of composition for these earliest Latin astronomical texts.

This article offers a survey of the ideas on kingship presented in the Icelandic Alexanders saga in close comparison with those offered by its source, the Alexandreis. Moreover, it sheds light on possible influences in the Alexanders saga stemming from the Icelandic historical background. In an analysis of how classical-Stoic thought found its way into the Alexandreis and the Alexanders saga, the study identifies the key role played by the speech of Aristotle to construct and update the king’s image, and the manner in which this is reflected in the narrative. I propose that there is no gradual process in Alexander’s downfall, although it is announced in three steps. The handling of ideas on kingship from the Alexandreis by the Icelandic author, and signs of self-awareness in doing so, is analyzed, offering insight in the recognition of such ideas on Iceland at a time of social-political change.

A key figure in the establishment of the Latin church in Arabic Sicily after the Norman conquest was Bishop Ansger of Catania 1091-1124. Newly found information shows that, by origin a Breton, he first became a monk at St. Florent of Saumur in the Loire valley, then made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return he entered the monastery of St. Eufemia in Calabria where his rise to the office of prior led Count Roger of Sicily to choose him, with the approval of Pope Urban II, as the first bishop of Catania and abbot of St. Agatha. In a distinguished career of thirty-three years he oversaw the construction of its great cathedral church, contributed to its cultural life - one of his monks, Geoffrey Malaterra, dedicated his famous history to Ansger - and in all probability was instrumental in the introduction of Latin abbeys from the Holy Land into Sicily. As a Latin poet he left a remarkable fifty-line testament of his life in rhymed verse.

This article examines the interplay of influences whereby the words privado and privanza - which do not refer to a specific office, but to a position of proximity to the king - none the less come to constitute a means of identifying certain protagonists in Castilian politics from the thirteenth century onwards. The analysis of historiographical and literary sources from the period makes it possible to pinpoint, in particular, those moments at which there appears to operate an appropriation of those terms. To begin with, this occurs hesitantly, as can be seen in the Libro de Alexandre and in certain passages of the Primera crónica of Alfonso the Wise, and via a whole range of models that act as mirrors, such as the privatz, or courtly lover, of Occitan lyrics; Dior, Charlemagne’s paladin; the Arab wasir; and various positions within the power structure of ancient Rome that implied a privileged relationship with the caesar. From all of these, the Castilian privado borrows some characteristics, while rejecting others.

Three main clerical perspectives on the vice of wrath emerge from this survey of thirteenth-century manuals that guided confessors when interrogating penitents and that influenced how they discussed anger. William Peraldus’s ascetical and spiritual-theological perspective emphasized the wrathful soul’s disquiet and how it leads to harmful behavior and estrangement from God. Raymond of Peñafort’s juridical approach measured overt, anti-social sins against Church law. John of Freiburg supplemented the juridical approach with moral theology from Thomas Aquinas. Although Thomistic psychology acknowledged the social nature of wrath much more than its spiritual aspects, Thomas’s concern was with probing the individual’s personal responsibility for anti-social sins and discord. Moreover, although all sought to balance the personal and social aspects of anger in various ways, manual writers did not present confession as a forum for interpersonal reconciliation, as has been postulated by historians interested in the social uses of penance in conflict resolution.

From the time of its earliest known copy in the fourteenth century, the Anglo-Norman legal treatise the Mirror of Justices (ca. 1290) has fascinated readers with its blend of fictional and actual law. Deemed a “romance” by F. W. Maitland, the text occupies uncertain territory between the fields of jurisprudence and literature, as it surveys and explains a legal system that it also seeks to critique and change. This article examines the tension between the encyclopedic ambitions of the Mirror and its reformist goals, arguing that many of the text’s most dramatic alterations to England’s legal past - including the invention of the so-called “original constitutions” of King Alfred - emerge from the effort to harmonize the procedures of the common law with an ethics of law-giving derived from biblical injunction. The article goes on to show the Mirror’s affiliation with an array of satirical, polemical, and reform-minded verse and prose from the late thirteenth century.

In the fifteenth century, a new interpretive strand emerges for Aesop’s fable of the hares and frogs. This fable, part of the post-classical corpus of Aesopian fables, is found in high and late medieval collections, both Latin and vernacular. Initially, the fable was understood as a type of ars vivendi, offering advice for its listeners, in particular on how to control fear. Listening to the hares’ experience, the audience was guided to a realization that fear is a condition shared by many creatures and one that should not lead to suicide. In the fifteenth century, this fable is read as a lesson on how to die, a reading that, I argue, can be seen in connection with the explosion of the new genre of the ars moriendi. Against the fable’s earlier literary history, I show how interpretation of this fable effectively went from an ars vivendi to an ars moriendi.

Three newly-recognized binding fragments at UCLA Library Special Collections, MS 170/743 pts. II-IV, preserve unique documents from the day-to-day functioning of the Châtelet of Paris in the late fifteenth century. Two of these are reports from named investigating officers of the Châtelet datable to ca. 1488; no similar documents are known from this early period. The third is a demande en taxe de dépens, a request by the winner of a civil suit at the Châtelet for compensation from the loser. Although documents of this sort are known from the parlement of Paris as early as the fourteenth century, none but the UCLA document survives from the early Châtelet. In view of the paucity of fifteenth-century documentation of the Châtelet, these are important additions to scholarly resources.

This article examines the development of the canonical Latin testament by analyzing the introductory phrases such texts have in common. It considers the familiar language of a typical fifteenth-century text before focusing in detail on the structure and wording of some of the earliest surviving documents of bequest, and on thirteenth-century will corpora from London, Exeter, and Worcestershire. The examples chosen illustrate the steady development of the form from evidentiary text to dispositive instrument, and from property transfer to the gift of chattels. The article shows that the canonical testament had achieved its developed form by 1300, and suggests that although there appear to have been comparatively few will formularies, the characteristic phrases traditionally associated with testamentary giving were nevertheless rapidly assimilated countrywide, the word choices reflecting the testament’s origins in an oral act as well as the legalities and practicalities of the probate process and the written record.

In the early 1460s, Florentine artist Alessio Baldovinetti created the design for a stained-glass window exemplifying the possibilities of aesthetic cross-culturalism. Surrounding the centralized coats-ofarms of Piero di Cosimo de’Medici, a band of glass pieces displays laudatory epithets in the Naskḫī/Thuluth script usually reserved for elite members of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. In this, the window’s pan-Mediterranean iconography represents a rare example of non-pseudo, Arabic calligraphy incorporated into an artwork of medieval or Renaissance Florence. Attending closely to the literal and symbolic languages of power, the stimulating reputation of the Levant, and the insertion of the window into a popular site of Marian devotion, this article argues that the combined symbolism of the window’s Medici heraldry and ostensibly “foreign” forms bolstered Piero’s authority in Florence by communicating his patronage as that of public benefactor and private ruler based upon physical proximity to the object and social proximity to the patron.

The immediate and communicative presence of the Bamberg Rider stands in stark contrast to his enigmatic identity, either lacking a specific identifying attribute or possessing redundant ones, preventing the production of a single coherent meaning. This article reexamines the armor-less Rider in light of later medieval notions of the “living statue” and the symulachrum. It argues that the sculpture was intentionally devised to produce a pure simulacrum (neither an historical nor an allegorical figure) receptive to the imaginative horizons of the viewers. In encouraging intuitive, emotional, and somatic responses, the statue is no longer conceived as a representation or imago but, rather, it becomes a speculation of its viewers, a wax upon which the subjective expectations are stamped. As a res and a presence of its own, the Rider operates within a ritualistic setting, in which it is reincarnated or re-enacted, substituting for whatever reality exists in the “here and now” of its viewers.

This article examines textual and visual evidence to show that in the second half of the fifteenth century manuscript Ptolemaic wall maps were produced, though no examples of the type survive today. These maps were a significant but heretofore unknown part of the cartographic reception of Ptolemy’s Geography. The Ptolemaic world map in the 1482 Venice edition of Pomponius Mela’s Cosmographia, and through it, the world map in Schedel’s Liber chronicarum, apparently derives from this tradition, and it is suggested that Henricus Martellus’s wall map now at Yale, and through it, Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, were inspired by maps of this type.