Brepols

The present collection explores a hitherto understudied body of Nordic medieval literature which, although overlooked in traditional, language-based narratives, was in fact crucial in shaping social and religious identities.

By drawing on the ‘performance turn’ in cultural studies, the volume identifies a number of minor and peripheral literary forms and texts that had a vital connection to ritual and ritualized speech. These neglected traditions therefore offer an alternative insight into Nordic literary life and the sets of cultural expression, or storyworlds, underlying Nordic culture.

The collected studies explore different aspects of verbal performances as a primary vehicle for the Nordic storyworlds, with a preference for the Christian over the pagan traditions. Emphasis is placed on Latin, Old Norse, and Finnish traditions that were retold and reproduced over time. These ‘living’ literary forms highlight the importance of non-canonical texts for the interpretation of contact between the peripheries and centres of Nordic culture. Through the focus on the interaction between Latin and the vernacular, between eastern Baltic and western Latin influences, and between ritual and speech in religious practice, this collection demonstrates the importance of ‘minor’ texts for the re-construction of medieval Nordic culture and history.

This study of Charles d'Orléans's personal manuscript of his poetry - the first in nearly a century - paves the way not only for a new edition of the duke's œuvre (by Mary-Jo Arn, John Fox, and R. Barton Palmer) but for a new view of it. Following the first complete modern description of the manuscript, this study reconstructs the history of the manuscript, copying layer by copying layer. Codicological observations supplemented with palaeographical, historical, art-historical, and textual information reveal the approximate sequence of the manuscript’s composition, which in turn allows a re-dating of the manuscript and some of the poems in it. Charles saw lyric form differently than did his predecessors and contemporaries, a view made manifest in the poet’s own numbering of his poems. He mixed his complaintes with ballades and his rondels with chansons, each pair of forms in a numbered series, but never presenting the longer alongside the shorter forms. The analysis of the manuscript’s construction corrects the current physical disorder of the later chansons and rondels, as well as that of the ‘En la forest de longue actente’ series (including the lyric omitted from the standard edition) and re-evaluates the handful of English poems in the manuscript. In the end, we come to understand the relationship between the visual ‘messiness’ of the manuscript and the poet’s strong concept of lyric order. The technical aspects of the study are clarified by many tables and fascimile pages; the interactive cd contains an index of first lines that can be sorted in various ways to reveal a variety of kinds of manuscript relationships.

Based upon a ‘performative’ interpretation of royal charters, The Politics of Memory and Identity offers a new and surprising narrative of West Frankish history from the death of Louis the Pious in 840 to the demise of the Carolingian dynasty in 987. The key is a carefully contextualised analysis of the circumstances in which kings issued charters and an alert examination of the charters’ verbal and visual semiotics. For which monasteries and cathedrals did kings issue diplomas and under what conditions? Who were the patrons who interceded for the recipients of diplomas and what titles were they given? Which kings were named as predecessors and which were omitted? Such clues allow us to recover the meaning of events whose significance was concealed by chroniclers, and to find unsuspected continuities in 150 years of West Frankish politics. They allow us to see a ruthless exercise of power in the use of forgeries and a commitment to political reform in the reform of monasteries. They reveal the long shadow cast by the reign of Charles the Bald in West Frankish history and the importance of a handful of monasteries as ‘sites of memory’. Above all, an intertextual reading of diplomas shows that political leaders in the kingdom made decisions based on policy, where the policy was articulated in terms of lessons drawn from their understanding of the past, and diplomas were the records that conveyed the lessons.

This volume explores attempts at the popularization of philosophy and natural science in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Medieval philosophers usually wrote their philosophical books for philosophers, so the desire to convey psychological, cosmological, metaphysical, or even physical teachings to the ‘vulgus’ may seem surprising. Yet philosophy was indeed taught to non-philosophers and via a variety of literary genres. Indeed, scholars have argued that philosophy most infl uenced medieval society through popular forms of transmission. Among the questions this volume addresses are the following: Which philosophers or theologians sought to direct philosophical writings to the many? For what purposes did they seek to popularize philosophy? Was the goal to teach philosophical truths? For whom exactly were these popularized texts written? How did they go about teaching philosophy to a wide audience? In what ways did popularized philosophy impact upon society? To what extent were the considerations and problems in the medieval popularization of philosophy the same or different in the various religious traditions of philosophy? How philosophical was the popularized philosophy?

In addressing these questions and others, this pioneering volume is the fi rst of its kind to bring together scholars of medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought to discuss the popularization of philosophy in these three religious traditions of philosophy.

Textiles were used as markers of distinction throughout the Middle Ages and their production was of great economic importance to emerging and established polities. This book explores tapestry in one of the greatest textile producing regions, the Burgundian Dominions, c. 1363-1477. It uses documentary evidence to reconstruct and analyse the production, manufacture, and use of tapestry. It begins by identifying the suppliers of tapestry to the dukes of Burgundy and their ability to spin webs between city and court. It proceeds by considering the forms of tapestry and their functions for urban and courtly consumers. It then observes the ways in which tapestry constructed social relations as part of gift-giving strategies. It concludes by exploring what the re-use, repair, and remaking of tapestry reveals about its value to urban and courtly consumers. By taking an object-centred approach through documentary sources, this book emphasises that the particular characteristics of tapestry shaped the strategies of those who supplied it and the ways it performed and constructed social relations. Thus, the book offers a contribution to the historical understanding of textiles as objects that contributed to the projection of social status and the cultural construction of political authority in the Burgundian polity.

The Prague Sacramentary is a unique liturgical manuscript which can be very precisely located in a specific social and historical context. It was written in the turbulent period when Charlemagne crossed Bavaria to fight the Avars and when his son Pippin rebelled against him, seeking support among the Bavarian nobility. The manuscript can be linked to specific groups of Bavarian elites that had to come to terms with this explosive political situation. It also elucidates the ways in which Christian culture was expressed and experienced in Bavaria at the end of the eighth century. Although Bavaria may be regarded as a periphery from a Frankish perspective, it was certainly no cultural backwater. Because of its geographical position at the crossroads of Italian, Bavarian, and Frankish culture, Bavaria produced unique and intriguing texts and artefacts.

One such object is analysed here by a team of experts, shedding renewed light on the earthly and heavenly concerns of an early medieval community in a specific region. It includes a discussion of the topics of the formal invocation of saints, vernacular understandings of Latin texts, marriage, politics, and concerns for ritual purity as well as the well-being of the conflict-ridden Carolingian family.

Over more than a thousand years since pre-Christian religions were actively practised, European - and later contemporary - society has developed a fascination with the beliefs of northern Europe before the arrival of Christianity, which have been the subject of a huge range of popular and scholarly theories, interpretations, and uses. Indeed, the pre-Christian religions of the North have exerted a phenomenal influence on modern culture, appearing in everything from the names of days of the week to Hollywood blockbusters. Scholarly treatments have been hardly less varied. Theories - from the Middle Ages until today - have depicted these pre-Christian religious systems as dangerous illusions, the works of Satan, representatives of a lost proto-Indo-European religious culture, a form of ‘natural’ religion, and even as a system non-indigenous in origin, derived from cultures outside Europe.

The Research and Reception strand of the Pre-Christian Religions of the North project establishes a definitive survey of the current and historical uses and interpretations of pre-Christian mythology and religious culture, tracing the many ways in which people both within and outside Scandinavia have understood and been influenced by these religions, from the Christian Middle Ages to contemporary media of all kinds. The present volume (I) traces the reception down to the early nineteenth century, while Volume II takes up the story from c. 1830 down to the present day and the burgeoning of interest across a diversity of new as well as old media.

The modern period has read its own contingent values into Middle English literature, and a modern canon of vernacular medieval literary texts has evolved as a result. While this book works with a selection of texts that have achieved such canonical status, it brings to light some of the ways in which they nevertheless resist the flattening domestications and expectations of modern taste. It illustrates how they formerly existed as constituents of a past world richer, stranger, and less familiar than much modern opinion has supposed. Thus the book aims to recuperate lost senses in which the age in which these texts were conceived and written was present within them, as well as ways in which they may have been present to their age. This twin idea of ‘presence’ is the thread that binds a series of chapters on English verse and prose written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries together. While they may be read as discrete studies of individual literary land- marks, the chapters also entail an implicit and ramifying demonstration of the short- comings of some modern views of what makes certain currently prized Middle English texts worth reading, and of how the vernacular literature of medieval England is retrospectively to be defined and periodized.

The articles in this volume explore the teachings on happiness by a range of thinkers from antiquity through Spinoza, most of whom held human happiness to comprise intellectual knowledge of that which is Good in itself, namely God. These thinkers were from Greek pagan, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian backgrounds and wrote their works in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. Still, they shared similar philosophical views of what constitutes the Highest Good, and of the intellectual activities to be undertaken in pursuit of that Good. Yet, they differed, often greatly, in the role they assigned to deeds and practical activities in the pursuit of this happiness. These differences were, at times, not only along religious lines, but also along political and ethical lines. Other differences treated the relationship between the body and intellectual happiness and the various ways in which bodily health and well-being can contribute to intellectual health and true happiness.

This volume explores the reception of biblical figures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with a particular focus on Antiquity and incursions in the Middle Ages and modernity. The contributions included here offer a glimpse of the complexity of the mechanics of transmission to which these figures were subjected in extra-biblical texts, either concentrating on one author or corpus in particular, or broadening the scope across time and cultural contexts. The volume intends to shed light on how these biblical figures and their legacies appear as channels of collective memory and identity; how they became tools for authors to achieve specific goals; how they gained new and powerful authority for communities; and how they transcend traditions and cultural boundaries. As a result, the vitality and fluidity of the developments of traditions become clear and prompt caution when using modern categories.