Brepols

Transforming Space deals with visible and invisible changes in premodern cities, their causes and the way in which they were perceived and received. The chapters in this book analyse the development and management of urban space, combining case studies and insights from a range of cities from all over Europe. Several contributions deal with the impact of major events on the urban tissue: geopolitics; disasters such as fires or wars; expropriation or redevelopment projects directed by urban governments; religious change such as the Dissolution in England, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the continent. On closer scrutiny, however, some of these major events were only an accelerator of already ongoing processes of change. By shifting the perspective from the city as a whole, to neighbourhoods, urban blocks or even plots of land, other chapters reveal how functional change or real estate dynamics changed the urban landscape almost imperceptibly. This book is written from a comparative perspective that takes into account path-dependency. Pre-existing power relations, ideology and mentality, the resilience of property structures, the impact of building regulations, subsidies, or the effects of real estate markets are shown to have had different outcomes for different social groups and the evolution of neighbourhoods.

The transitions of the title are those in the life and intellectual development of one of the leading historians of late antiquity and Byzantium. Averil Cameron recounts her working-class origins in North Staffordshire and how she came to read Classics at Oxford and start her research at Glasgow University before moving to London and teaching at King’s College London. Later she was the head of Keble College Oxford at a time of change in the University and its colleges. She played a leading role in projects and organisations even as the flow of books and articles continued, in an array of publications that have been fundamental in shaping the disciplines of late antiquity and Byzantine studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The volume deals with the issue of translation automatisms in early vernacular texts predating 1650. It introduces the novel concept of ‘translation clusters’, first defined in machine translation theory, but equally considering a wider array of situations that involve ‘translation units’, ‘language automatisms’, ‘culturemes’, and ‘formulaic borrowings’ in vernacular texts. Contrary to contemporary languages, where translation units, clusters, and automatisms appear frequently due to the influence of standard language varieties or dialects, the vernacular idioms of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period are often pluricentric. Consequently, automatisms are limited to specific cases where diachronic, diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic variants align similarly in two otherwise different translations. This is a crucial topic for philology, as it can explain accidents that ecdotic methods tend to mistake for variant readings of a single ‘redactio’. The volume aims to determine the organic interplay between three primary situations in which common coincidences between translations or texts occur. Firstly the volume explores the shared elements resulting from the transfer of textual units between multiple translations or adaptations (quotations, corrections, formulas). Secondly chapters study the shared elements arising from the existence of a common source text (translation clusters, based on translation units); and lastly, the volume questions the fixed, inherent, and unchangeable aspects of the target language (language automatisms, often coinciding with translation units). The chapters of this volume focus on numerous vernacular languages and a multitude of case studies, with a particular emphasis on biblical translation—a cornerstone of contemporary translation studies. The chapter format encourages diverse perspectives to push the boundaries of philology, translation studies, and “vernacular theologies”.

The nineteenth century saw the rapid development of textual criticism for establishing the “best” and “most authentic” forms of both Ancient and Mediaeval texts thanks to the method perfected by Karl Lachmann, who based himself on the insights gained during the eighteenth century. Lachmann’s method has been further refined by later philologists, with, most interestingly, the use of computers in establishing the mutual relations of manuscript witnesses since the last decades of the twentieth century. However, the interest in what form the texts, both Ancient and Mediaeval, were actually circulating in the Late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, has been slow to emerge as an area of scholarly interest. In other words: what did the readers actually get in front of their eyes, and acted upon as, say, doctors, historians, theologians between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries?

This volume explores the Late Medieval and Renaissance transmission of texts of different genres, languages and periods from the book historical point of view, taking into consideration not only the textual but also the material aspect of the traditions.

The authors include eminent specialists as well as mid- and early career scholars.

1066 is one of the most well-known dates in English history: but how far do we understand the mental and emotional lives of those who experienced it? In just over a month, England was rocked by two separate invasions, multiple pitched battles, and the deaths of thousands. The repercussions of these traumatic events would echo through the history and literature of northern Europe for centuries to come.

Drawing on studies of trauma and cultural memory, this book examines the cultural repercussions of the year 1066 in medieval England, Normandy, and Scandinavia. It explores how writers in all three regions celebrated their common heritage and mourned the wars that brought them into conflict. Bringing together texts from an array of languages, genres, and cultural traditions, this study examines the strategies medieval authors employed to work through the traumas of 1066, narrating its events and experiences in different forms. It explores the ways in which history and memory interacted through multiple generations of writers and readers, and reveals how the field of trauma studies can help us better understand the mental and emotional lives of medieval people.

This collection of research, which brings together contributions from scholars around the world, reflects the range and variety of work that is currently being undertaken in the field of travel and mobility in the European Middle Ages. The essays draw on diverse methodological approaches, from the archival and literary to the art historical and archaeological. The collection focuses not just on key medieval modes of travel and mobility, but also on themes whose relevance continues to resonate in the modern world. Topics touched upon include religious and diplomatic journeys, migration, mobility and governance, gendered mobilities, material culture and mobility, mobility and disability, travel and status, and notions of home and abroad. Broad themes are approached through case studies of individuals, families, and groups, ranging from kings, queens, and nobles to friars, exiles, and students. The geographical reach of the collection is particularly broad, encompassing travellers from Southern, Western, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe and journeys to destinations as diverse as Scandinavia, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. A wide-ranging and detailed introduction situates the collection in its scholarly context.

Discovered by the French scholar, Marcel Richard, on one of his photographic expeditions to the monastic libraries of Mount Athos, the Thesaurus was entrusted to a young scholar, Joseph Munitiz, who prepared the editio princeps for his doctoral thesis, defended at the Sorbonne in 1976. The work was shown to have been composed by a little-known spiritual author, thought to have been active in the fourteenth century, but placed, thanks to a passing reference in his Treasury, in the middle of the thirteenth century. This semi-encyclopaedic work was intended to provide an overview of the sort of knowledge considered essential for a young prince, as one chapter is an exhortation to a future emperor. Thus it contains a summary of the Old Testament, with curious reflections (e.g. on female wickedness and the ingenuity of Solomon), and chapters on dogmatic questions: the divinity of Christ; the value of Holy Scripture; the sacraments, icons, the Theotokos, and the key role of the Ecumenical Councils. A large part is made up of moral exhortations attributed partly to Amphilochios and backed by pious stories. There are also florilegia, so popular in Byzantine spiritual writings, focused around the eucharist, the priesthood, sexual morality and confession. At the end, some questions-and-answers (another popular Byzantine genre) deal with items of general knowledge (ranging from theology, through astronomy, to alms-giving). In general, the work opens a window into the mind of the ordinary believer in mediaeval Constantinople.

The source text of this volume appeared with the title Theognosti Thesaurus as volume 5 in Corpus Christianorum Series graeca, in 1979. References to the corresponding pages of the edition are provided in the margin of this translation, along with a list of corrections of the Greek.

For centuries, the Council of Trent has been studied as a fundamental episode in European history wherein doctrinal and institutional unity was lost. Although the Council decrees nowhere refer to the contexts of the peoples met by Christopher Columbus, nor to the Cathay regions rediscovered by missionaries, nor to their religions, their superstitions or their political systems, the Council was nonetheless a global event. The Roman Church, which lost doctrinal control of the considerable part of Europe captured by different forms of Protestantism, imposed itself upon its followers through the application of conciliar decrees. Freed of its exclusively European perspective it opened up to cultures of the rest of the world. The customs and traditions thus encountered, the relationships with political authorities, possibilities for the construction of a new Christianity offered by New Worlds, disclosing spaces and contexts to the Tridentine Church, with accommodations and cross-fertilizations, with a return to origins and tradition, obliged that it begin to think of itself, perhaps for the first time, as a universal Church.

The Council and Beyond suggests not only reconsideration of Europe through the prism of the Tridentine decrees and the long processes of their dissemination, but also through an intercontinental consideration, a spatial perspective that would become universal to the Church and to the normative texts that had been elaborated at Trent.

In 1517, the Brabant city of Louvain witnessed the foundation of the Collegium Trilingue (Three Language College). Funded by means of the legacy of the humanist and diplomat Jerome of Busleyden (d. 1517) and steered by guiding spirit Erasmus of Rotterdam, this institute offered courses in the three so-called sacred languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, which students could attend for free. However, this kind of initiative was not unique to Louvain in the early 16th century. In a time span of barely twenty years, Greek and Hebrew were also offered in Alcalá de Henares (near Madrid), Wittenberg, and Paris, among other places. It would not take long before these ‘sacred’ languages were also on the educational agenda at universities throughout the whole of Europe.

The present volume examines the general context in which such polyglot institutes emerged and thrived, as well as the learning and teaching practices observed in these institutes and universities. Devoting special attention to the study of the continuity, or rather the discontinuity, between the 16th-century establishment of language chairs and the late medieval interest in these languages, it brings together fifteen selected papers exploring various aspects of these multilingual undertakings, focusing on their pedagogical and scholarly dimensions. Most of the contributions were presented at the 2017 LECTIO conference The Impact of Learning Greek, Hebrew, and ‘Oriental’ Languages on Scholarship, Science, and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was organized at the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Louvain Collegium Trilingue.

This book offers unprecedented insights into the richness of Scottish culture in the early modern period, studying triumphal entries — that is, processional civic welcomes offered to royal guests — staged in Edinburgh in the period between 1500 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Based on a comprehensive and imaginative analysis of the written and archival sources available for these events, it also brings renewed attention to the country’s artistic, architectural, and literary traditions. The analysis of comparable events staged in England and continental Europe — in France, the Italian peninsula, and the Low Countries — helps frame Scotland’s distinctiveness within a network of international connections. The book explores how the urban space of early modern Edinburgh was employed with changing fortunes to address potentially explosive power dynamics, expressed by civic and royal, secular and religious (pre and post Reformation), Scottish and post-1603 pan-British worldviews. Scottish triumphal culture is presented as profoundly embedded in the urban context within which it is set, rich in politicised rituals of negotiation and mutual acknowledgement, and visually vibrant through temporary structures, decorations, pageants, and costumed performers. This book offers a well-rounded answer to the still relevant question of Scottish identity, and how identity and power — individual, communal, national, royal — can be performed through active engagement with civic space.