Brepols

As a historical and cultural phenomenon, monasticism always had a close connection with frontiers. The earliest monasteries were believed to be founded in wildernesses and deserts, thus existing beyond society and the inhabited world in general. As intercessors praying for their patrons and benefactors, monastic communities also existed on the border between the earthly and the spiritual worlds.

In medieval Europe, however, the frontier nature of monasticism had specific manifestations in addition to the founding myths of monastic wilderness. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the expansion of Latin Europe in East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and into the Holy Land and Greece opened possibilities for extending monastic networks and establishing new houses. One of the most important parts of this process was the interaction between these new religious communities and the social world around them - an interaction that was characterised by various shades of hostility, cooperation, and adaptation to the local social and cultural framework.

This is the first collection to consider the phenomenon of monastic frontiers in a cross-disciplinary manner. The book’s ten chapters explore the role of monasteries in maintaining political and cultural borders, in breaking and sustaining linguistic boundaries in late medieval Europe, as well as in building and stabilizing Latin Christian cultural identities on the northern and southern frontiers of Europe. Using a wide range of textual, archaeological, and material evidence, an international group of authors examines the expansion of monastic and mendicant networks in Scandinavia, Iberia, East-Central Europe, the British Isles, northern France, the Balkans, and Frankish Greece.

Monasticism became part of European culture from the early period of Christianity and developed into a powerful institution that had a profound effect on the greater Church, on wider society, and on the landscape. Monastic communities were as diverse as the societies in which they lived, following a variety of rules, building monasteries influenced by common ideals and yet diverse in their regionalism, while also contributing to the economic and spiritual well-being inside and outside their precincts.

This interdisciplinary volume presents the diversity of medieval European monasticism with a particular emphasis on its impact on the immediate environs. Geographically it extends from the far west in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to the east in Romania and the Balkans, through the north of Scandinavia to the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on archaeological, art and architectural, textual and topographical evidence, the contributors explore how monastic communities were formed, how they created a landscape of monasticism, how they wove their identities with those around them, and how they interacted with all levels of society to leave a lasting imprint on European towns and rural landscapes.

Cet ouvrage présente les résultats d’une enquête, menée par des archéologues et des historiens, sur l’organisation spatiale du monachisme au Moyen Âge. Il propose tout à la fois des synthèses inédites sur plusieurs complexes ou cités monastiques et une réflexion sur les processus d’articulation et de hiérarchisation des lieux de vie, de culte et de production constitutifs des monastères occidentaux. Il s’intéresse entre autres aux différentes formes de circulation - déplacements pragmatiques, déambulations liturgiques, parcours mentaux - qui ont favorisé la structuration et la monumentalisation de ces ensembles religieux.

La mise en place et le développement des monastères sont ici appréhendés au travers des usages de l’espace, par l’étude des monuments, des textes et des images qui en portent la trace. Les auteurs de ce volume mettent ainsi en évidence la genèse et la transformation d’un système de lieux singulier qui fut, dans l’Occident médiéval, l’un des principaux laboratoires des représentations et des pratiques de l’espace social.

Fondée à la fin du x e siècle, Montpellier connut une expansion fulgurante à partir du xii e, à la faveur du développement d’échanges culturels et économiques, vers la Méditerranée ou le nord de l’Europe. Cette expansion était le fruit de politiques menées par les Guilhem et confirmée lors du passage de la seigneurie sous l’autorité des rois d’Aragon et de Majorque après 1204, quand la ville obtint un gouvernement consulaire. Devenue une communauté urbaine d’importance au xiii e siècle, Montpellier était habitée par une population cosmopolite. Dans et hors les murs se croisaient grands marchands, changeurs et simples revendeurs, universitaires et intellectuels de renom, artisans et agriculteurs. L’attractivité et le rayonnement de Montpellier en faisaient l’une des principales villes du Bas-Languedoc. Pourtant, son histoire médiévale n’a bénéficié que d’une attention inégale de la part des chercheurs. Cet ouvrage procède d’un colloque international réuni à Montpellier en 2013 et rassemble des articles réalisés par les principaux contributeurs et principales contributrices à l’histoire et à l’archéologie de la ville. Basées sur des archives originales ou sur la réinterprétation de données connues, les recherches proposées ici, tout en présentant un bilan des travaux passés, empruntent des voies nouvelles démontrant les promesses des études historiques et archéologiques sur Montpellier.

This volume honours Sible de Blaauw on the occasion of his retirement from Radboud University. It is above all a tribute to an influential and respected voice in the field of early Christian art and architecture. Thirty-one authors have sought to provide their own unique answer to the question of how Christian cult buildings have played a role in cultural memory in different periods and in various geographical and cultural contexts. From its very onset, this publication was envisioned as a parallel to De Blaauw’s own research interests: Rome and its monuments, early Christianity, Christian religious heritage, liturgy and architecture, continuity of tradition, and memory. The contributions have been arranged according to three sections: Monuments - Places - Decoration & Liturgical Furnishing. Every essay addresses the memorial potential of Christian buildings, of their location, or of the accoutrement, whether or not still in situ. Not surprisingly, Rome re-appears frequently in all sections, with Rome’s churches receiving special attention. Together the essays cover a period from Late Antiquity to modern times, from Helena to Gerhard Richter, from late antique poets to a Ravennesque mosaic in the 1930s. Thus, this volume assumes the diachronic nature that characterizes De Blaauw’s own scholarship. The leitmotifs of Christian cult and material and immaterial constructions of the past tie together the sections as well as the book as a whole. Nevertheless, the main binding element between the essays is their authors’ fondness and appreciation of Sible de Blaauw.

There have been many books on the medieval culture of death, but this book is the first devoted to the use and representation of the dead in English medieval writing. Mortality and Imagination is a history of the literary ‘life’ of the dead - in their narrative, aesthetic, and ideological formulation - a theme which up to now has been explored only fragmentarily, available only in studies of particular genres. Kenneth Rooney’s book explores a wider range of texts and genres than has been attempted before, and reads the vernacular representation of the dead against the impact of one of the most intriguing cultural phenomena of the Middle Ages - the macabre - a rhetorical and artistic idiom designed to evoke the dead at their most horrifying. Tracing the models for the representation of the dead available to English writers, the author offers fresh readings of texts both familiar and neglected, including sermons, tale collections, romances, drama, lyrics, and other genres in the period c.1100-1550. This book is a stimulating appraisal of the impact, in medieval insular contexts, of an international idea of great longevity and significance, and makes an important contribution to the study of death, belief, and society in pre-modern Europe.

Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He has published widely on Middle English poetry and medieval romance.

When did Late Antiquity actually end? Peter Brown, who has done so much to define the field, once replied: ‘always later than you think’. This book takes stock of this insight and, in continual conversation with Peter Brown’s work, applies it to ever wider social and geopolitical horizons. The essays of this volume demonstrate that Late Antiquity is not just a period in which the late Roman world grew into the three successor cultures of the Roman Empire - the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Islamic world - but also a set of hermeneutical tools for exploring historical transformation. A late antique view considers both the profound plurality of past societies and the surprising instances when a culture coheres out of those differences. The studies here follow those motions of fracture and alignment, and they show how working along the lines of a single but deeply textured vision of Late Antiquity makes it possible to integrate different fields such as Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic studies, and to start a new conversation between ancient and medieval history.

This collection focuses overtly on the internal dynamics and links between art markets in the Early Modern period, but presupposes that art objects - here visual images - are objects of desire. During this period, however, desire changed; a great deal more of these objects came to be made for ordinary domestic consumption, including devotional purposes, than as tokens of the magnificence, piety, cultivation or learning of individual commissioners. Probably most still were commissioned, but to satisfy tastes that, though differentiated internationally, were widely shared within one country or region. Most too were commissioned at a distance, by agents, and were moved between maker and end-point distributor by specialised traders, many of whom - though far from all - were large-scale operators. The dominant focus of contributors here is therefore on the agents of this distance trade, its mechanisms and its impacts in terms of both satisfying and subtly shaping tastes, all at a range of prices. Measurement and mappings are aspects of this traffic. Focus was sharpened by concentrating on three questions: what is currently known about the number of images, whether in the form of paintings, prints, small sculptures or woven textiles, that circulated in early modern Europe? Through what channels and networks were they distributed? And what were the economic, social and institutional contexts?

This previously unknown Hebrew writer is a unique witness of the blend of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism as well as of Jewish and Christian sources in Jewish philosophy in Italy (first half of the 14th century).

While it is well-established that Brittany and the Insular world were closely linked during the medieval period, the precise nature of these connections continues to spark debate. Was there a significant migration in the fifth century, or were the connections more multi-faceted and enduring than medieval accounts suggest? And how might we triangulate the Atlantic connections with other influences on medieval Brittany, including those from the Carolingian world?

Drawing together research that was first presented at the conference ‘Brittany and the Atlantic Archipelago: Contact, Myth and History 450-1200’, held in Cambridge in December 2017, this volume seeks to present new and ground-breaking research into both Brittany and its broader European context during the medieval period. The chapters gathered here range across various disciplines, including textual history, archaeology, hagiography, onomastics, and the study of liturgical evidence, offering new insights into our understanding of medieval Brittany, as well as drawing out particular connections (and disconnections) between Brittany and its neighbours.

This book contains research papers related to the scientific activities in the Ottoman Empire which comprise various scientific traditions, including the Islamic tradition inherited by the Ottoman Turks and carried on by the Arabs, who were part of the Empire and then joined by European peoples, such as the Bosnians and Albanians newly converted to Islam ; as well as the tradition of different Christian peoples living in Anatolia and the Balkans, (e.g. the Greek Colleges where “ new ” science was taught), and the contributions of native Jewish scholars as well as those who emigrated from Andalusia. The Ottoman world had the necessary grounds for the interaction of all these different traditions. The Ottoman Empire held vast lands in Europe and, as a result of the contact with European science from the very early ages, the new scientific European tradition spread in the Ottoman lands for the first time outside its own cultural environment where it originated.

The Ottoman Empire gave rise to 29 national states in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The Ottomans both depended on the previously established Turkish-Islamic scientific tradition and at the same time engaged in attempts to transfer the new technologies and sciences that developed in the Western world. The new European science and technology was also adopted very early by the followers of the Enlightenment and later by those of Nationalism among the non muslim populations of the Empire, and of course by the national states originated from this Empire.

All these aspects about the nature of science in the Ottoman Empire and the complex network of scientific and educational relations of the various populations in this Empire and the national states which followed, as well as the relations between the science of these populations and these new states and Europe, have been discussed in these papers almost for the first time.

The thirteen articles in this volume deal with the Neo-Latin emblem book after the birth of the genre with Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (1531). While the interest in emblematics has grown considerably during the last decades, the seminal Neo-Latin production has received relatively little attention. In Mundus Emblematicus an international team of experts in the field makes this part of the emblem tradition accessible to a broad scholarly audience. The articles cover a variety of emblem books published at the time, ranging from influential humanist collections (for instance those by Achille Bocchi, Hadrianus Junius, or Joachim Camerarius) to alchemist (Michael Maier) or religious emblems (such as the books of the Calvinist Théodere de Bèze, or the Jesuit Herman Hugo). In each paper subjects dealt with include the historical context of the work and its makers, the relation between word and image, the structure of the collection as a whole, and the emblematic game (intertextuality in word and image). Moreover, several articles explore the interaction between the emblem and connected literary phenomena, like the commonplace-book, the fable or the use of commentaries. All papers are in English and all examples from Latin texts are translated.

Together, these articles show the variety within the Neo-Latin emblem production, thus challenging traditional approaches of the emblem. As such Mundus Emblematicus contributes towards a more comprehensive view of the forms and functions of the genre as a whole

For more than a millenium, singers in churches, monasteries, and private chapels across Europe have closed their worship with the joyful musical exclamation Benedicamus Domino (‘Let us Bless the Lord’). This moment has sounded in song many times a day: at the end of the Mass, the Office hours, outside the church walls in celebratory processions, as well as in informal sacred, devotional, and festive contexts. Benedicamus Domino was uniquely associated with an unprecedented amount of creative freedom in the sacred rituals of the Christian West: plainchant melodies could be adopted at will from other parts of the liturgy, and this moment inspired a proliferation of poetic and polyphonic elaborations from the eleventh century on.

This collection of essays brings together interdisciplinary contributions from eighteen scholars, illuminating the wide range of ritual, musical, poetic, manuscript, and generic contexts for the Benedicamus Domino versicle in the period c.800­–1650. Individual chapters engage with the evidence of liturgical commentaries and Patristic texts, Ordines, and hagiographies. They present and analyse musical and textual embellishments of the Benedicamus Domino, as well as their written traces and material contexts, with several sources discovered or discussed in detail here for the first time. Encompassing a wide geographical and generic scope, this volume reveals unsuspected continuities and contrasts in the history of the Benedicamus Domino versicle in medieval and early modern Europe.

Throughout the history of the Church, music has regularly been placed under the critical microscope. Nonetheless, the intensity of thought concerning music’s role in the liturgy and in spiritual life in general reached a peak during the period of the European Reformations. This multidisciplinary collection examines the debates and controversies around music and theology during that time from both Catholic and various Protestant perspectives. It includes twenty essays from musicologists, theologians, Biblical scholars, and Church historians that attempt to answer the following questions: What difference did the theological and ecclesiological developments of the sixteenth century make to musical forms and practices? What continuities of practice existed with former times? How was the desire to restore the church to an imagined pristine state manifest in music and liturgy? How did developments in exegesis arising from the massively increased knowledge and access to the Bible in Hebrew and Greek affect the way composers wrote and congregations heard? Why did some reformers embrace music, while others rejected it?

This book opens up discussion on the liturgical music of medieval Ireland by approaching it from a multidisciplinary, European perspective. In so doing, it challenges received notions of an idiosyncratic ‘Celtic Rite’, and of the prevailing view that no manuscripts with music notation have survived from the medieval Irish Church. This is due largely to a preoccupation by earlier scholars with pre-Norman Gaelic culture, to the neglect of wider networks of engagement between Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe. In adopting a more inclusive approach, a different view emerges which demonstrates the diversity and international connectedness of Irish ecclesiastical culture throughout the long Middle Ages, in both musico-liturgical and other respects.

The contributors represent a variety of specialisms, including musicology, liturgiology, palaeography, hagiology, theology, church history, Celtic studies, French studies, and Latin. From this rich range of perspectives they investigate the evidence for Irish musical and liturgical practices from the earliest surviving sources with chant texts to later manuscripts with music notation, as well as exploring the far-reaching cultural impact of the Irish church in medieval Europe through case studies of liturgical offices in honour of Irish saints, and of saints traditionally associated with Ireland in different parts of Europe.

Since the end of the last century, Ennodius has been the object of increasing interest among scholars of late antiquity. Developments in Ennodian criticism are also addressed in this volume, that presents the results of more than twenty years of research on the relationship – always dialectical and not infrequently innovative – that Ennodius maintains as a poet with the Latin literary tradition, both profane and Christian. The chapters of the book revisit – in English and in one case with substantial modifications – eight of the author’s previously published papers on Ennodius, along with one unpublished contribution.

Areas that have been specifically investigated include the functions that he assigns to poetry compared to those he assigns to prose, his original re-treatment of some literary genres, and his thematic, stylistic, lexical and metric choices. The last chapter explores the literary influence exerted by Ennodius’ poetry on the text of his epitaph. The very fact that its unknown author – certainly a great admirer of the deceased – did his best to imitate his style is a significant testimony to the prestige that Ennodius enjoyed after his death in the diocese of Pavia of which he had been the bishop.

Si les premières traces de ritualisation musicale (noces, banquets…) remontent au début du xiii e siècle avec les jongleurs, ce n’est vraiment qu’à partir du siècle suivant que les ménétriers ou joueurs d’instruments sont chargés de la représentation des pouvoirs et de l’animation de la vie sociale dans sa totalité (fêtes politiques et religieuses, de métiers, calendaires, votives, familiales, etc.) et qu’ils se regroupent en confréries ou corporations.

S’appuyant sur son « terrain » toulousain premier ainsi que sur le dépouillement systématique de deux siècles de littérature sur les ménétriers des provinces françaises et sur la collaboration de certains chercheurs en régions, l’auteur propose une nouvelle réflexion d’ampleur sur le personnage historique du ménétrier (plus de trois mille musiciens recensés), son genre, son statut social (poids de la marginalité musicienne des aveugles, mendiants, concurrence des musiciens occasionnels comme les maîtres d’école), sa fonction, sa pratique et ses formes d’organisation.

Cette étude d’anthropologie musicale historique est doublée d’une approche territoriale, cette géographie ménétrière étant abordée au niveau des provinces, des villes (notamment des quarante ayant abrité des corporations et confréries ménétrières), des villages et de l’organisation administrative de ce vaste espace de la Ménestrandise (royauté et lieutenances ménétrières). Par ailleurs, cette histoire sensible de l’art des ménétriers est aussi celle de leur rapport aux musiques dites « savantes », d’église, aux cultures musicales autres, comme celle des Bohémiens. 

À l’aide de nombreuses archives, de tableaux, cartes, documents iconographiques, cet ouvrage dépeint la grande fresque d’une musique historique encore méconnue, malgré sa longévité et sa centralité sociale et sociétale, celle des ménestrels et joueurs d’instruments.

The conjunction of medieval religious studies and gender studies in the past several decades has produced not only nuanced attention to medieval mystics and religious thinkers, but a transformation in the study of medieval culture more broadly. This volume showcases new investigations of mysticism and religious writing in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It also presents groundbreaking explorations of the feminized divine, from medieval to modern, and the many debts of medieval secular texts and cultures to the religious world that surrounded them. Medieval crossover also defines this volume: the contributors examine the crossovers between male and female, cloister and saeculum, divine and human, and vernacular and Latin that characterized so much of the complexity of medieval literary culture. These collected chapters examine mystics from Hildegard of Bingen and Juliana of Cornillon to Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Tomás de Jesús; the modern theologies of Philip K. Dick and Charles Williams; goddesses like Fame, Dame Courtesy, and Mother Church; and the role of religious belief in shaping conceptions of pacifism, obscenity, authorship, and bodily integrity. Together, they show the extraordinary impact of Barbara Newman’s scholarship across a range of fields and some of the new areas of investigation opened by her work.

Contributors: Jerome E. Singerman, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Jesse Njus, Andrew Kraebel, Nicholas Watson, Laura Saetveit Miles, Bernard McGinn, Carla Arnell, Maeve Callan, Katharine Breen, Lora Walsh, Susan E. Phillips and Claire M. Waters, Carissa M. Harris, Stephanie Pentz, Craig A. Berry, Dyan Elliott.

From Europe to the Ottoman Empire, from Mesoamerica to the Mughal dynasty, rulers and peoples in the early modern period put deities and culture heroes in their family trees. The essays in this collection investigate the issues of ancestry, descent, kinship, and kingship that are revealed by this worldwide practice. The authors explore the meaning and role of 'myth' in different global cultures, and how the social role of myth defined identity through genealogical discourse. What did people understand by 'mythical' and how did they think of themselves as related to their mythical past? How seriously were these various claims of mythical descent taken? And how did claims function within the different power relations of societies around the globe? Up to now, the predominant Eurocentric perspective in early modern studies has encouraged a focus on Renaissance Greco-Roman mythology and its role in literature and art. This volume, however, breaks new ground through its unique exploration of the way in which the genealogical use of 'myth' was shared by world cultures.

Ce recueil contribue à poser une solide fondation en vue de l’élaboration de la biographie de Pierre Gassendi. Il regroupe les Vies de Gassendi écrites au XVIIe siècle, et offre la première étude analytique et comparative des deux versions de la vie « de base », rédigée par Antoine de la Poterie, le dernier secrétaire de Gassendi. Pour compléter la collection sont ajoutés plusieurs poèmes commémoratifs et ‘in memoriam’ dont plusieurs inédits. Ces documents permettent de suivre la formation et la diffusion de l’image de Gassendi que ses disciples et amis ont voulu créer. En même temps les événements de sa vie sont racontés en détail, la comparaison de rédactions différentes permettant de les contrôler et les vérifier. Tous les documents sont munis d’introductions et de commentaires. Ceux qui sont composés à l’origine en latin sont traduits.

This collection of essays explores the multifaceted representation of power and authority in a variety of late antique and medieval hagiographical narratives (Lives, Martyr Acts, oneiric and miraculous accounts). The narratives under analysis, written in some of the major languages of the Islamicate world and the Christian East and Christian West - Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian - prominently feature a diverse range of historical and fictional figures from a wide cross-section of society - from female lay saints in Italy and Zoroastrians in Sasanian and Islamic Iran to apostles and bishops and emperors and caliphs. Each chapter investigates how power and authority were narrated from above (courts/ saints) and below (saints/laity) and, by extension, navigated in various communities. As each chapter delves into the specific literary and social scene of a particular time, place, or hagiographer, the volume as a whole offers a broad view; it brings to the fore important shared literary and social historical aspects such as the possible itineraries of popular narratives and motifs across Eurasia and commonly held notions in the religio-political thought worlds of hagiographers and their communities. Through close readings and varied analyses, this collection contributes to the burgeoning interest in reading hagiography as literature while it offers new perspectives on the social and religious history of late antique and medieval communities.

The origins of the Cistercian monastic order are currently under intense scrutiny and revision, as scholars identify how the written word was used to ‘invent’ a unified corporate identity. Here Elizabeth Freeman examines the classic genre for inventing a past - the history, chronicle, and annal - and argues that historical narratives of the English Cistercians helped define the characteristics of both the new Cistercian monastic order and also the new orders of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. She shows how Aelred of Rievaulx’s Relatio de standardo and Genealogia regum Anglorum articulated new senses of Englishness, and demonstrates through attention to library holdings that this focus on national self-definition continued throughout the twelfth century. The Fundacio abbathie de Kyrkestall shifts focus to local history and exploits Cistercian tropes of land-use in order to resolve the communal insecurity that characterised the Cistercians in around 1200. The Narratione de fundatione Fontanis monasterii features another method of reconciling the nostalgic quest for continuity with the intellectual recognition of change - it separates historical ‘fact’ from ‘meaning’ and imbues events with rich allegorical significance. Finally, Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum indicates the multiple strategies Cistercian historians employed in order to turn the disparate and contradictory events of the past into a comprehensible and meaningful narrative.

Can - and should - an encyclopaedia be a repository of all knowledge? Does the idea of total encyclopaedic knowledge constitute a boon for readers, or is it a labyrinthine nightmare? This book explores the pleasures and paradoxes of encyclopaedism, viewed through the interpretative lenses of the works of Alexander Neckam (1157-1217), an English Augustinian canon and scholar. Neckam wrote not just one but two encyclopaedias: the prose De naturis rerum (‘On the natures of things’) and the verse Laus sapientie divine (‘Praise of divine wisdom’). Poised between the end of the ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth century and the scholasticism-inspired thirteenth century, Neckam invites us into an unfamiliar universe in which encyclopaedias are intentionally incomplete, and in which warnings about the vanity of knowledge coexist with vivid descriptions of new technological inventions. This strange union is facilitated by the exegetical method of tropology or moral reading. Through analogy, vivid imagery, and constant recourse to ethics, Neckam’s encyclopaedias aim to educate their readers until they leave the text behind and engage in a reading of the world in a quest for knowledge, experiencing not only its pleasure and beauty, but also its inherent power.

Although barbarians in history is a topic of perennial interest, most studies have addressed a small number of groups for which continuous narratives can be constructed, such as the Franks, Goths, and Anglo-Saxons. This volume examines groups less accessible in the literary and archaeological evidence. Scholars from thirteen countries examine the history and archaeology of groups for whom literary evidence is too scant to contribute to current theoretical debates about ethnicity. Ranging from the Baltic and northern Caucasus to Spain and North Africa and over a time period from 300 to 900, the essays address three main themes. Why is a given barbarian group neglected? How much can we know about a group and in what ways can we bring up this information? What sorts of future research are necessary to extend or fill out our understanding? Some papers treat these questions organically. Others use case studies to establish what we know and how we can advance. Drawing on those separate lines of research, the conclusion proposes an alternative reading of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, viewed not from the ‘centre’ of the privileged but from the ‘periphery’ of the neglected groups. Neglected Barbarians covers a longer time span than similar studies of this kind, while its frequent use of the newest archaeological evidence has no parallel in any book so far published in any language.

Traditional historiography generally stresses the opposition and contradiction between secular and ecclesiastical power. By contrast, this volume focuses upon the interdependence of secular and ecclesiastical power and on the ways both secular rulers, kings, counts and other lords, and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions continuously interacted, trying to affirm the relationships between them. This selection of a historiographical introduction plus nine case-studies from England, northern France and the Low Countries enables a subtle comparison of secular and ecclesiastical links and social interactions in a series of regional and local contexts during the Central Middle Ages. The volume demonstrates that this process of negotiation led to an affirmation of shared values and contributed to the creation of common social values in medieval Europe.

Ludo Milis (Universiteit Gent), “This book, composed around three major themes (‘Texts as Tools of Power’, ‘Land and Kinship’, and ‘Conflict and Affirmation’), exemplifies how medievalists can reshape their discipline into a more responsive one. Its scope is not to offer a wide range of definitive explanations, but it shows how medievalists should try (and indeed do try) to return to a close reading of their documents. For far too long, institutional history, legal history, and histoire événémentielle have tried to monopolize power relationships and to encapsulate them in rather narrow explanatory schemes. This volume offers a broader and more encompassing approach.”

The authors of this volume examine various fields of cultural discourse in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century: the political, commercial, religious, artistic, and sensory domains, and less obviously metaphysical properties like time and space. What defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities, and their economies dominated political relations. A dense network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In Antwerp, culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and, at the same time, carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as a means of social and self-improvement. Antwerp is omnipresent in this book, with essays on its painting, printing, politics, and public festivals. But other cities such as Bruges, Leuven, and Leiden also figure prominently. It was precisely the interconnectedness of urban centers, large, middle and small, rather than their autonomous character, that defined civic culture in the Low Countries. Among the topics treated are differing notions of urban topography, the dialogue between city and court, issues of censorship, and the sensory and psychological response to texts and images.

By the late thirteenth century, Norgesveldet - the Norwegian realm - stretched far beyond its core in western Scandinavia. At its height in 1264, Norgesveldet connected Norse speakers in tributary territories ranging from the Irish Sea to Orkney and across the Atlantic to the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. But what held this disparate realm together? What were the dynamics of power between the men and women of the governing and elite classes of Norgesveldet? And what roles did different bodies play at different levels of society in creating and maintaining these networks - from kings and bishops to scribes and scholars, traders, and law-makers?

This volume aims to expand on and further recent important research into connections between Norway and the wider Norse North Atlantic from the eleventh century, during which the Norwegian kingdom began to emerge, through to the fourteenth-century decline of Norgesveldet with the creation of the Kalmar Union. Each chapter addresses a different facet of the Norgesveldet networks, building a complex picture of both their function and their evolving nature. Taking as its inspiration the research and career of its honorand, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, the volume explores medieval Norway and its wider connections using three key frameworks - sociopolitical networks, legal and material networks, and literary networks - with the aim of shedding new light on the people and processes of this North Atlantic polity.

This volume will serve as a textbook for studying this field, and as an introduction to current research. It is written in accessible language for non-specialists. The volume has three sections: introductions by two of the leading exponents worldwide: Michael Clanchy and Marco Mostert; a series of essays by members of the Utrecht ‘Pionierproject’ which consider writing and written culture against the background of all forms of communication available to a given medieval society, both in western and east-central Europe; and a comprehensive bibliography on the subject, comprising 1500 titles which will serve as a fundamental starting-point for work in this field.

The detailed study of the Septuagint opens new avenues of interpretation of the biblical text and enables new advancements in exegetical studies. The Greek version can be studied through several different approaches and the application of exegetical methods, old and new, contributes to a better understanding of numerous literary, historical and theological aspects of the Bible. The present volume collects the contributions written by renowned scholars who address the issue of the role and impact of Septuagint studies on biblical exegesis and theology. The papers range from more methodological discussions to exegetical studies applying various approaches to the Septuagint text. The wide variety of methods applied reveals numerous aspects of the Septuagint and the biblical text in general, such as their composition, history, textual transmission, literary scope and shape, theology. The diversity of methods and analyses of the Septuagint represented in this book have, nevertheless, a common denominator: Biblical exegesis would benefit greatly from a deeper knowledge of the Septuagint.

This book of essays is dedicated to the memory of Riccardo Francovich, one of Europe’s most eminent Medieval archaeologists, who died in 2007. It began as a one-day conference held at the British School at Rome the day after Riccardo Francovich would have been 65 years old, on the 11 June 2011.

The book takes as its core theme a comparison of Italian and Spanish Medieval Archaeology, in each case challenging the status quo and attempting to move the boundaries of our historical discussions ever forwards. The volume attempts to evaluate if the Medieval Archaeology of these two important Mediterranean countries, largely unfamiliar on the international stage, with their different ‘histories’, can be compared. To do this, a key moment in their formation is reviewed - the passage from the Ancient to the Medieval world. This approach highlights not only the identifi cation of singular conjunctures (the impact of the new ‘barbaric’ aristocracies on the social structures of the Roman world, and how Islam was established, for example, in the peninsula as in Sicily), but also parallel evolutions at the macro-structural level (for example, conditions in towns and the countryside). Taking the paradigm of fragmentation as a basic starting-point that characterizes the western world after the fall of the Roman Empire, it offers comparative archaeologies in terms of themes, but above all else in terms of shared methods.

During the twentieth century scholars discovered that oral poetry in entirely unrelated cultures in the world share a basic characteristic: the use of verbal formulas, more or less fixed word strings, which were inherited from tradition. The discovery of formulas revolutionized the understanding of oral tradition, and how oral poetry was transmitted. Homer, Eddic poems, Karelian laments, Serbian heroic poetry, etc., were suddenly seen in a new light. But the original Oral-Formulaic Theory has also been questioned and revised. New approaches in the study of formulas have been developed among linguists and folklorists.

The present volume discusses new approaches, models, and interpretations of formulas in traditional poetry and prose. The twenty authors in the volume analyze formulas in a broad context by letting oral traditions from all over the world shed light on each other. The volume aims to deepen our understanding of the function and meaning of these formulas. A unique feature is that the volume focuses as much on formulas in oral prose as in poetry – usually formula studies have focused entirely or mainly on poetry.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Scandinavia was rocked by an ongoing period of ‘civil war’, conflicts traditionally characterized by medieval historians as internal struggles that took place in the context of predominantly national, state-centred, political and constitutional frameworks. This volume, however, aims to overturn these established narratives, with carefully curated essays written by experts in the field offering a new pan-Scandinavian perspective on the period in question that emphasizes the importance of fluid, often overlapping social networks, permeable borders between realms, and constant underlying hostilities between rival groups. Through detailed examinations of pivotal moments in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish history, together with analyses of topographical patterns, gender issues, diplomacy, and three contributions that draw parallels within similar conflicts outside of Scandinavia, this book provides an important corrective to teleological narratives of the medieval ‘civil wars’ as a necessary stage on the route to state formation and modernity.

In his magnum opus De Trinitate, the twelfth-century canon Richard of St. Victor offers sustained reflection on core dogmatic claims from the Athanasian creed. At the heart of the treatise is Richard’s argument for exactly three divine persons. Starting with the necessity of a single, maximally perfect divine substance, Richard reasons along four steps: (i) God must have maximal charity, or other-love; (ii) to be perfectly good, delightful, and glorious, God’s other-love must be shared among at least two, and (iii) among at least three, divine persons; (iv) the metaphysics of divine processions and love each ensure the impossibility of four divine persons. For Richard, Scripture and trustworthy church authorities already provide certainty in these truths of faith. Even so, as an act of ardent love, Richard contemplates the Trinity as reflected in creation. From this epistemic point of departure, he supports his conclusions from common human experience alone.

Recently, philosophers of religion have employed Richard’s trinitarian reflection as a springboard for constructive work in apologetics and ramified natural theology. His unique and meticulous approach to the Trinity has garnered attention from scholars of medieval and Victorine studies, recognizing the novelty and rigour of his philosophical theology.

This volume presents the first focused exploration of Richard’s central thesis in De Trinitate, combining historical context with philosophical scrutiny. It confronts the most challenging aspects of his argument, presenting Richard’s insights as not merely intriguing but also profoundly compelling. His thesis, if validated, promises to significantly enrich modern dialogues on the philosophical and theological dimensions of the Trinity.

This volume examines the faculty of theology of the University of Vienna after the new institution produced its first students. Taking Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl as our guide to this nascent academic milieu, the five contributors illuminate the university system at Vienna, describe the evolution of doctrine, identify the network of professors that developed the specific curriculum, and trace the reception of the academic writings outside the university. Traditionally the history of medieval universities is based primarily on statutes, cartularies, or other documents relating to the organization of the university as an institution. The present studies instead inspect the underside of the iceberg and penetrate the academic context of Vienna by reading and editing the texts issuing from the practice of teaching. The papers gathered here shed new light on the main pedagogical protagonists, measure the impact of the transmission of ideas between the Universities of Paris and Vienna, and provide access to the community of scholars to whom this material was addressed.

This is the first edition of Nikola Vitov Gučetić’s (1549–1610) compendium of philosophical and theological problems arising from Aristotle’s De anima Book 3, Chapter 4, where he begins his discussion of the thinking part of the soul, that is, the intellect (nous). With the interpretation of Averroes (1126–1198), this text has structured much of the debate on the immortality of the soul in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Gučetić’s Breve compendium is a testament to these debates, interesting for its selection of issues for discussion in connection with Aristotle’s text, and for its open defence of the Averroist position in the late decades of the sixteenth century. Although Gučetić had a preliminary arrangement with Aldo Manuzio the Younger to print this text around 1590, at some point he abandoned the plan to publish it.

The main purpose of this book is to provide a critical edition of the Latin text for scholars in the humanities, especially historians of late Medieval and Renaissance philosophy. The edition is accompanied by an introductory study that places the author and his work in the historical and intellectual context, describes the manuscript, and gives a detailed synopsis of the work. This will make the book useful also to students of the humanities and those interested in the history and culture of Dubrovnik.

En hommage à Paul Mattei, Professeur de langue et littérature latines à l’Université Lyon-II – Lumière, ce volume rassemble quarante-huit contributions consacrées à la patristique, au christianisme antique, ainsi qu’à la littérature tardoantique et médiévale.

Divisé en huit sections, le volume propose dans les quatre premières des études sur les Pères africains, sur Augustin en particulier ainsi que sur d’autres Pères latins et sur des questions exégétiques. Sont ainsi évoquées les figures de Tertullien, Cyprien de Carthage, Augustin d’Hippone, mais également Ambroise de Milan, ainsi que des aspects aussi bien lexicaux, littéraires que doctrinaux de la lecture de la Bible par les Pères, latins et grecs.

Les quatre sections suivantes proposent des contributions sur la poésie tardoantique, païenne ou chrétienne, sur la littérature latine et grecque du Moyen-Âge, sur l’histoire, en particulier ecclésiastique, et sur des questionnements linguistiques.

Les contributions inédites rassemblées dans ce volume témoignent de la richesse des liens scientifiques tissés par Paul Mattei.

Le caractère pan-européen des guerres de religion suscite des questions sur l’incidence des frontières et le rôle des acteurs qui les franchissent ou les transgressent. Cet ouvrage retrace les parcours transrégionaux et confessionnels des Croÿ, une puissante maison nobiliaire établie de part et d’autre des frontières séparant la France et les Pays-Bas habsbourgeois, à travers la reconstitution des engagements politiques et religieux de ses membres (Porcien, Aarschot, Chimay, Havré, et leurs épouses ou mères Amboise, Lorraine, Clèves, Brimeu, Dommartin).

Ce volume montre comment ces noblesses transrégionales bâtissent leur influence à l’ombre des rivalités internationales entre rois de France et d’Espagne, empereurs et ducs de Lorraine, et du choix de la religion au temps des Réformes; comment elles assemblent stratégiquement leurs domaines, patronnent une clientèle locale et se font reconnaître comme souverains de micro-principautés; et comment elles mobilisent ce capital politique en rivalisant avec d’autres lignages catholiques (Guise, Clèves) ou protestants (Condé, Bouillon), en désobéissant à leur prince ou en négociant leur réconciliation avec lui.

Ont contribué à ce volume Anne Mieke Backer, Aurélien Behr, Olivia Carpi, Nette Claeys, Gustaaf Janssens, Alain Joblin, Odile Jurbert, Tomaso Pascucci, Sanne Maekelberg, Pieter Martens, Jonathan Spangler et Sylvia van Zanen.

Advances in the modern interpretation of myth and in the history of ancient religion in general have radically modified our ways of studying the names and the naming of the gods. Two avenues of research notably are current today : the relationship between the narration of the myth and the name (all « speaking » names tell a story) and the necessity for the faithful to identify, to distinguish and to name the divine, in polytheisms naturally, but also in monotheisms. Can the name of a god be only a label? Calling (for help), singing (in praise), invoking (with others), calling to witness (as a guarantee), all involve this important act of identification, a recognition, in the heart of a process which seems more complex than it appeared to be at first glance.

The fact that this identification is made in common (and in community) draws attention to another methodological requirement. Beyond the signified « divine entity » lie the language act and its context, which are part of the naming : this means that its linguistic and social aspects must be taken into consideration.

By its treatment of the Greek and Roman religions, but also, in the interest of a comparatist point of view, the Egyptian religion (under the pharaohs and the Ptolemies), Oscan-speakers, Judaism and Christianism, by its treatment of texts, literary and other, in prose and in poetry, papyri, inscriptions, vascular graffiti, the present book opens new perspectives through the meeting of rhetoric and religion.

The result of two colloquia organised by the Universities of Rennes, of Strasbourg, and of Naples, Naming the Gods is a book which has been carefully constructed and thought out through time ; it promises to be a landmark.

Ce volume regroupe les contributions de vingt-deux chercheur.es universitaires, collègues et ami.es de Claude Lafleur, qui ont voulu lui rendre hommage à l’occasion de son départ à la retraite en tant que professeur titulaire à la Faculté de philosophie de l’Université Laval. La diversité des aires géographiques et la pluralité des strates générationnelles auxquelles appartiennent les chercheur.es qui ont contribué à ce livre témoignent éloquemment de l’envergure de la « sphère d’influence » des productions intellectuelles de Claude Lafleur.

Les textes réunis relèvent des principaux champs de recherche que leur ami et mentor a patiemment labourés au cours de sa carrière académique : histoire des corpus et des manuscrits; transmission des textes philosophiques et de leurs notions fondamentales, de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge; éditions critiques de textes issus des Facultés des arts et de théologie de l’Université de Paris aux xiiie-xive siècles; enseignement de la philosophie au xiiie siècle à la lumière des textes didascaliques; histoire des pratiques discursives dans les Facultés des arts médiévales; étude de concepts clés de la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin; discussion médiévale sur les universaux; philosophie de l’histoire des médiévistes contemporains.

Ce recueil d’études souhaite ainsi se faire le reflet de certains des intérêts heuristiques, des orientations méthodologiques et des thématiques historico-philosophiques que Claude Lafleur a poursuivis, explorées et étudiées dans ses propres écrits, ayant toujours été convaincu « qu’il n’y a pas de statut plus excellent que de vaquer à la philosophie ».

Le Colloque Normes et Hagiographie, tenu à l’Université Lyon-III en octobre 2010, porte bien son nom: il ne s’est pas donné pour objet d’étude l’hagiographie latine comme source d’exemples de comportement, mais bien les relations complexes que les sources hagiographiques entretiennent avec les normes qui régulent les sociétés médiévales occidentales. Puisque, de fait, les textes hagiographiques forment un corpus commun de références et de modèles pour les sociétés christianisées, le projet des organisateurs a été de « partir des normes médiévales » pour évaluer dans quelle mesure l’hagiographie avait contribué à les élaborer, à les faire évoluer voire à les contredire. C’est une question d’histoire des textes, bien loin d’une approche morale des attitudes morales et religieuses. Marie-Céline Isaïa, maître de conférences en histoire du Moyen Âge à l’Université Jean-Moulin Lyon-III, est membre du CIHAM (UMR 5648). Depuis la parution de Remi de Reims. Histoire d’un saint, mémoire d’une Église (Paris, 2010), elle poursuit ses travaux sur les relations entre hagiographie et écriture de l’histoire, du Ve au XIe siècle. Thomas Granier est maître de conférences en histoire du Moyen Âge à l'Université Montpellier-III, membre du CEMM (EA 4583) et membre de l’École Française de Rome. Il a publié plusieurs articles sur l’'histoire de l’Italie du sud du haut Moyen Âge.

Our modern notions of privacy have their roots in the early modern period. When studying this historical background, one of the most important sources is correspondence. Letters sent from one person to another reflect specific situations, ideas, thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Contextualizing an epistolary exchange provides information about the world and values of past individuals.

This volume presents essays that deal with a variety of early modern correspondence. The letters analysed, written in French, Dutch, German, and English, speak to very different contexts and cultural codes. While each of the letters in question has its own unique story to tell, all contributions come together by focusing on notions of privacy. From the intimacy that unfolds in educational exchanges to specific letter-writers and their strategic use of the private, this volume offers ground-breaking insights that will be relevant to many different researchers and their respective fields: the history of science, the history of Christianity, the history of travel writing and education, gender studies, and the history of diplomacy. In addition, the contributions also tackle the issue of publishing letters in the early modern period, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a material praxis.

Together, the essays show how ‘privacy’ was an ambiguous term in the early modern period; the letter as literary genre and a means of communication demonstrates how privacy was perceived both as valuable and as a potential threat.

Les précédents colloques des Rencontres médiévales européennes ont renouvelé notre connaissance des origines de l’architecture gothique en mettant en évidence les liens qui existent entre le propos de Suger, tel qu’il a pris corps à Saint-Denis, et les nouveaux courants spirituels du xii e siècle. Les études réunies dans le présent volume prolongent cette enquête. Elles rappellent en particulier le rôle important joué par l’évêque de Paris, Maurice de Sully. Proche des Victorins, attentif aux directives réformatrices de la papauté, il fonde sa pastorale sur un renouveau liturgique dont l’exigence théologique n’est jamais exclue. C’est à lui, par exemple, que l’on doit la pratique de l’ostension de l’hostie. On trouvera ici le portrait de cet évêque exceptionnel ainsi que l’analyse de son grand dessein: la reconstruction de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. Cette entreprise fut accompagnée d’une renaissance artistique perceptible notamment dans le domaine musical. En arrière-plan, on retrouve l’abbaye de Saint-Victor, dont on a tenté d’évaluer l’influence dans la vie spirituelle du temps. L’œuvre de Godefroid, auteur d’un Microcosme, illustre bien ce milieu si original. Notre époque traversée de révolutions et d’incertitudes peut encore tirer des leçons du manifeste que fut en son temps Notre-Dame de Paris.

Les Actes d'un colloque tenu à Albi en 2009 qui a réuni de jeunes universitaires présentant leurs recherches dans plusieurs domaines de l'étude de l'occitan: la littérature, la linguistique, la musique, du Moyen Âge à nos jours. De nouvelles approches scientifiques par des étudiants venant de plusieurs pays. Sous les rubriques de littérature et musique du Moyen Âge, des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, l'ère moderne, avec aussi des discussions de la langue et la littérature occitanes comme outil pour les historiens. Une mise en valeur non seulement des études occitanes mais de la langue même, utilisée pour présenter quelques-unes de ces communications scientifiques.

L’essor des traductions directes du grec au français commence dans les années 1550. Du début du XIVe siècle jusqu’au milieu du XVIe siècle, les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française qui représentent la Grèce ancienne n’ont, sauf exception, aucune connaissance directe des œuvres grecques. Les savoirs sur la Grèce qu’ils transmettent et réinventent sont médiatisés par des filtres divers. Leur réception est indirecte, elle prend appui sur des œuvres antérieures, textuelles et iconographiques, dont les représentations de la Grèce ancienne sont déjà le fruit d’une ou de plusieurs réceptions.Les œuvres latines qu’ils traduisent et adaptentsont pour une part des œuvres antiques et médiévales qui ne sont pas des traductions, et pour une part des traductions ou adaptations d’œuvres grecques, avec parfois plusieurs transferts linguistiques à partir du grec. Elles sont très diverses : des textes antiques jusqu’aux traductions humanistes latines d’œuvres grecques réalisées en Italie et aux Pays-Bas, en passant par des œuvres latines médiévales originales, des traductions latines du français et des traductions arabo-latines et arabo-hispano-latines.

Les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française héritent ainsi de réceptions antérieures diverses, qu’ils s’approprient et transforment, poursuivant le processus d’invention de représentations de la Grèce ancienne. Comme les manuscrits et les imprimés de leurs nouvelles traductions sont souvent très illustrés, les artistes offrent dans le même temps des traductions visuelles qui elles aussi s’appuient sur des sources diverses et des réceptions antérieures et donnent à voir de nouvelles images de la Grèce ancienne. La question de la réception de l’Antiquité grecque sera donc explorée par une entrée différente de celle qui a été adoptée jusqu’à présent et qui a consisté en l’étude de la transmission et de la traduction directes des œuvres grecques. Le présent volume se focalise sur les traductions au second degré de textes grecs.