Brepols

Between 1000 and 1536 Scandinavia was transformed from a conglomerate of largely pre-state societies to societies with state governments. The state increasingly monopolised ‘legitimate’ violence. Church and state used literacy to strengthen social control in central and important areas: jurisdiction, religion and accounting. Written laws made social norms more precise and easier to change, a necessity in an increasingly complex society. The basic social transformations of the period cannot be attributed to increasing literacy alone, but the written word rendered them more peaceful and gradual, and strengthened social conformity and cohesion. Writing in Roman letters was introduced late to Scandinavia (ca. 1000 ad); consequently the transition from orality to literacy is better documented than in many other European societies. The rich saga literature from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries emerged at the time that administrative literacy was introduced. Until the fourteenth century, literacy was mainly promoted by church and state in their efforts to pacify and control society. Then the literate elites grew, encompassing ever larger groups of officials, clerks, merchants and artisans, many of whom were now educated in town schools. The resulting elite culture prepared the ground for the development of a proto-national identity.

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Aqiva as the Holy of Holies among the sacred Scriptures, the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial biblical books. Celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and the faithful, this ambivalent book, which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation, was a text crucial to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and held a particular appeal for poets. Indeed, the Song of Songs played a significant role in the development of European poetry from its very beginning, creating an exceptional convergence of sacred and secular languages and horizons of meaning.

Written by a group of distinguished international scholars, this volume explores the complex and multifaceted processes through which the Song of Songs entered, influenced, and interacted with medieval and Renaissance European poetry (twelfth to seventeenth centuries). Focusing on both individual authors – including Peter Riga, Dante Alighieri, Richard Rolle, and George Herbert – and particularly relevant poetic traditions – including Hebrew liturgical poetry and the Tristan and Ysolt tradition, Middle English and Petrarchan lyric, Renaissance verse versions and seventeenth-century musical compositions, dissident and prophetic texts – the volume unveils the relevant role played by the biblical book in the development of European poetry, thought and spirituality, highlighting its ability to contribute to different poetic genres and give voice to a variety of religious, political, philosophical, and artistic intentions.

This volume includes papers presented during a symposium on the spreading of the scientific revolution outside Western European countries, which was held during the XXth International Congress of History of Science in Liège in 1997.

The contributions aim to answer some recent historiographical questions such as the modalities of the spreading of science in different countries, the reception of the new science by different cultures, the kind of changes this reception set in motion, the periodisation in adopting the new scientific knowledge, the structures set up for this adoption.

Three geographical areas are presented here: the European countries in the border of the "scientific center", Latin America countries and East Asian regions.

The volume constitutes the first attempt at making a synthesis at an international level on the important question of the spreading of the "new science" throughout the world.

The Christian practice of the Stations of the Cross has historically largely been the purview of devotional authors. In this academic study, the Reverend Doctor Sarah Lenzi revisits the evidence-based history of the western European development of the Stations as it was laid out at the turn of the twentieth century. She begins with a discussion of how this history is often neglected in favor of a mythic history that places the development in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades and she then reestablishes the western origins. While the early twentieth-century authors who worked on the Stations are invaluable for the history they uncovered, there were gaps in the analyses they offered based on that history. In the chapters that follow, Rev. Dr. Lenzi works to debunk those interpretations and to offer a new understanding of the development of the Stations of the Cross. A close examination of pilgrimage texts as well as medieval meditation manuals puts this particular practice in the broader context of Medieval Christian history and ritual, and works to place it appropriately on the spectrum of pietistic behavior. With a new understanding of the development of the Stations of the Cross, Rev. Dr. Lenzi helps to explore notions of time, place, and space in Medieval Christianity, arguing for an understanding of placelessness in Christian piety that is enabled through intentional ritualized use of imagination, narrative, body, and word.

From the last quarter of the eighth until the beginning of the tenth century, Carolingian monasteries, cathedrals, and courts were the sites of a vigorous scholarship grounded in the study of sacred Scripture. The significance of Bible studies in this epoch is evident from the many extant Carolingian commentaries on virtually every book of the Old and New Testaments. More works of this kind survive from the period, often in multiple copies, than is true for any other genre of literature. Although scholars used to dismiss the Carolingian Bible commentaries as uncreative compilations of material borrowed from the Church Fathers, in recent years appreciation of these tracts’ essential creativity has grown significantly. In addition, there is now increased recognition of the degree to which the ‘exegetical’ culture nurtured within the Carolingian schools fertilized other aspects of contemporary intellectual and cultural endeavour.

The essays in this collection offer a fresh look at the range of biblical studies and their impact on diverse domains of Carolingian culture and learning. The bibliography provides a record of critical editions of Carolingian-era Bible commentaries and secondary scholarship in the field published within the last twelve years.

Medieval astronomers used tables to solve most of the problems they faced. These tables were generally assembled in sets, which constituted genuine tool-boxes aimed at facilitating the task of practitioners of astronomy. In the early fourteenth century, the set of tables compiled by the astronomers at the service of King Alfonso X of Castile and León (d. 1284), reached Paris, where several scholars linked to the university recast them and generated new tables. John of Lignères, one of the earliest Alfonsine astronomers, assembled his own set of astronomical tables, mainly building on the work of previous Muslim and Jewish astronomers in the Iberian Peninsula, especially in Toledo. Two major sets had been compiled in this town: one in Arabic, the Toledan Tables, during the second half of the eleventh century, and the Castilian Alfonsine Tables, under the patronage of King Alfonso.

This monograph provides for the first time an edition of the Tables of 1322 by John of Lignères. It is the earliest major set of astronomical tables to be compiled in Latin astronomy. It was widely distributed and is found in about fifty manuscripts. A great number of the tables were borrowed directly from the work of the Toledan astronomers, while others were adapted to the meridian of Paris, and many were later transferred to the standard version of the Parisian Alfonsine Tables. Therefore, John of Lignères’ set can be considered as an intermediary work between the Toledan Tables and the Parisian Alfonsine Tables.

In the recent past, critical discussions concerning notions such as ‘cultural area’ and ‘area studies’ - as well as their relativization by means of conceptions that avoid splitting clearly identified areas (inter alia, ‘third space’, ‘hybridity’, ‘diaspora’, or ‘cosmopolitanism’) - have drawn attention to the long history of cultural territorialization. This book attempts to open the history of philosophy to reflexive and globalizing tendencies elaborated in the field of ‘world history’. From the seventeenth century onward, in both modern Europe and North America, historical sciences - notably philosophical historiography and cultural history - colonized both the past (or national pasts) and the ‘rest’ of the world. The contributions gathered in this volume address both phenomena to the extent that they have been linked with modern historicization of philosophy, sciences, and culture.

El interés que los autores de estos trabajos demuestran por las complejidades y consecuencias de la traducción en la Edad Media, o de la traducción de textos medievales en el período moderno, ha dado como resultado un volumen diverso y estimulante intelectualmente. Los trabajos del presente volumen, escritos en inglés, francés y español, se centran en el tema de la traducción desde muchas perspectivas, ofreciendo una amplia gama de interpretaciones del concepto de traducción. El volumen contiene trabajos que abarcan en el tiempo desde el período Anglo-Sajón hasta el presente, y en temática desde libros de recetas medievales hasta argumentos a favor de que las mujeres administren la Eucaristía. Las lenguas que se estudian incluyen no sólo lenguas no europeas sino también el Latín y numerosas vernáculas europeas, ya sean como lengua origen o lengua meta. Como cualquier traductor o estudioso de la traducción puede rápidamente constatar, es imposible separar lengua de cultura. Todos los autores de este volumen han analizado en profundidad las complejidades de la traducción como hecho cultural, aún cuando el foco de atención pareciera ser específicamente lingüístico. Son estas complejidades las que dotan al estudio de la teoría y práctica de la traducción en la Edad Media de su perdurable fascinación.

The interest of the writers of these essays in the intricacies and implications of translation in the Middle Ages, or of the translation of medieval texts in the modern period, has resulted in a diverse and intellectually stimulating volume. The papers in this volume, written in either English, French, or Spanish, approach translation from a wide variety of perspectives and offer a range of interpretations of the concept of translation. The volume contains essays ranging in time from the Anglo Saxon period to the present, and in topic from medieval recipe books to arguments in favour of women administering the sacrament. Languages studied include non-European languages as well as Latin and numerous European vernaculars as both source and target languages. As any translator or student of translation quickly becomes aware, it is impossible to divorce language from culture. All the contributors to this volume struggle with the complexities of translation as a cultural act, even when the focus would seem to be specifically linguistic. It is these complexities which lend the study of the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages its enduring fascination.

Complexité et fascination: deux mots qui reviennent souvent à l’esprit au contact des textes médiévaux, au point qu’ils pourraient servir à caractériser la nature des rapports qui unissent ces textes à leurs traducteurs. Dans leur diversité, les communications entendues à Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle illustrent, chacune à sa manière, de nombreux aspects de cette complexité, qu’il s’agisse des sujets traités ou des problèmes techniques soulevés. Le rapport au temps qu’impose le texte médiéval se double d’un rapport à la distance, car la différence culturelle se présente au traducteur comme un éloignement, ce qui, dans le travail de rapprochement que constitue alors la traduction, introduit la notion d’interprétation. A son tour cette interprétation, avec ses degrés, est étroitement dépendante des objectifs pédagogiques, culturels, politiques ou religieux que s’est fixés le traducteur, comme cela apparaîtra clairement à la lecture d’un certain nombre de ces communications. Plusieurs études de ce recueil confirment également que la traduction, loin d’être un travail de solitaire, est avant tout un acte social, une activité de mise en relations. C’est cette patiente recherche d’adaptation à des publics différents, en fonction d’époques et de goûts différents, accompagnée de choix tour à tour réjouissants et frustrants, qui constitue le travail de tout traducteur, qu’il appartienne au Moyen Âge ou au monde moderne. C’est aussi cette richesse, venue du passé mais toujours actuelle, et cette recherche sans cesse reprise d’un équilibre toujours instable, qui font que la traduction, dans sa pratique comme dans sa théorie, exerce sur tant d’esprits une réelle fascination.

With its vital character - growing, flowering, extending its roots into the ground, and its branches and leaves to the sky - the tree is a polyvalent metaphor, a suggestive symbol, and an allegorical subject. During the Middle Ages, a number of iconographic schemata were based on the image and structure of the tree, including the Tree of Jesse and the Tree of Virtues and Vices. From the late eleventh century onwards such formulae were increasingly used as devices for organizing knowledge and representing theoretical concepts. Despite the abstraction inherent in these schemata, however, the semantic qualities of trees persist in their usage.

The analysis of different manifestations of trees in the Middle Ages is highly instructive for visual, intellectual, and cultural history. Essays in this volume concentrate on the formative period for arboreal imagery in the medieval West, that is, the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Using a range of methodological strategies and examining material from different media, ranging from illuminated manuscripts to wall painting, stained glass windows, and monumental sculpture, the articles in this volume show how different arboreal structures were conceived, employed, and appropriated by their specific contexts, how they functioned in their original framework, and how they were perceived by their audience.

In the region that was to become Moldavia and Wallachia, there are almost no traces of the use of writing for the millennium after the Roman Empire withdrew from Dacia. Written culture surfaces only by the second half of the fourteenth century, after the foundation of state institutions. This book surveys the earliest extant documents, their issuers, and the motives that triggered the development of documentary culture in Moldavia and Wallachia. By the fifteenth century, Moldavians were already accustomed to the use of charters. In Wallachia, noblemen also appealed to written records, but at that stage mainly in extraordinary circumstances. Women could not inherit land, and noblemen requested princely charters confirming a legal fiction that turned their daughters into sons. After the mid-sixteenth century, Wallachia experiences a steep growth in the number of charters issued. In this period of economic and social upheaval, charters proved an extraordinary means for the protection of landed property. Yet neither principality held secular archives - the storage of documents for later use in private hands suggests an early stage in the development of documentary culture.

By covering the ‘birth’ and spread of pragmatic literacy in medieval Moldavia and Wallachia, this book thus fills an important lacuna in what is known about the development of literacy in the later Middle Ages.