Brepols

This volume discusses the key shift from manuscript to print culture in the history of books, taking The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman as models of the way in which a medieval text's unique tradition influenced its transition from manuscript to print. The forces of the Reformation era did not produce the same effect across the varied textual legacy of the Middle Ages. Every text that made the transition from manuscript to print brought with it a set of concerns, a tendency to address a particular readership in particular ways, a physical presence developed in manuscript culture, all of which might shape the pathways by which a text might arrive in print, and what it might look like when it got there. This study follows The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman from their circulation in manuscript to their presentation in print, in order to track how each of them survived the metamorphosis of the relationship between writers and readers as the new technology was introduced. Taken together, the three case studies demonstrate to scholars of any medieval literature the variety of possible impacts made when texts composed in manuscript culture were prepared for printing. The great force exerted by the technological and cultural developments of the English Reformation, not least the more centralized legislative regulation of the press, has long been central to the study of the history of books. This volume takes into account the ways in which individual textual traditions pushed back or accelerated the forces of early modern reform, producing their own plural reformations.

Qu’il s’agisse d’écrire sous le nom de Pythagore, d’Orphée, de la Pythie, ou encore de Paul de Tarse ou d’Énoch, les Anciens usaient de noms d’emprunt célèbres pour s’exprimer. Phénomène fondamental de l’Antiquité, la pseudépigraphie n’a cependant fait l’objet d’aucune monographie avant les années 1970, avec le livre de Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (1971), et les Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt, Pseudepigrapha I. Pseudopythagorica – Lettres de Platon – Littérature pseudépigraphique juive (1972). Le sujet a alors suscité les critiques de plusieurs savants. Plus récemment, la somme que Bart Ehrman a consacrée à la question, Forgery and Counterforgery (2013), par les vives réactions qu’elle a provoquées – parfois critiques, parfois élogieuses – a contribué à relancer le débat. Le présent volume se propose de revenir sur ces importantes synthèses, en les abordant sous l’angle de figures précises, ainsi que d’époques, de langues et de régions diverses. Il vise aussi à élargir la recherche en mettant à l’épreuve les différentes théories énoncées dans la littérature savante. Il est désormais devenu essentiel d’étendre et de remodeler cette notion de pseudépigraphie qui touche également à celles d’« auctorialité », d’inspiration poétique, d’intention des auteurs antiques et de genres littéraires.

Les images-reliquaires, dont la singularité attire notre attention, se définissent par la complexité de leur composition tant au point de vue artistique qu’au point de vue religieux. Il s’agit ici des peintures sur panneau de bois (plus rarement, sur verre églomisé), ayant fonction de porte-reliques, et décorées dans certains cas de pierres précieuses ou semi-précieuses. Le modèle de tableau-reliquaire : panneau unique, diptyque et triptyque comprenant le portrait de la Vierge à l’Enfant enchâssé dans une large bordure incrustée de reliques, se répandit particulièrement dans la péninsule italienne, et par la suite en Europe centrale. Cependant, les reliquaires polonais, connus sur le territoire de la Petite-Pologne durant le xv e siècle jusqu’au début du siècle suivant, ne sont mentionnés que de manière sporadique dans l’histoire de l’art. Ils sont apparus dans quelques articles, mais sans avoir fait l’objet d’aucune analyse spécifique quant à leur contenu iconographique, leur similarité formelle, ainsi qu’à l’égard de leur usage dévotionnel. C’est pourquoi, nous souhaitons les joindre aux créations semblables répandues dans l’art entre Orient et Occident au Moyen Âge. Dans la même optique, il serait également intéressant de s’interroger sur la continuité de tels objets au-delà de l’époque médiévale.

In this book Claudia Daniotti provides the first comprehensive study of the representation of Alexander the Great in Renaissance Italian art, exploring a fundamental turning point in the tradition: the transition from the medieval imagery of Alexander as a legendary, fairy-tale hero to the new historically grounded portrait of him as an example of moral virtue and military prowess.

During the Middle Ages, Alexander was turned into a fabled creature and fearless explorer, whose Flight to Heaven and other marvellous adventures were tirelessly recounted and illustrated, enjoying huge popularity. With the humanist recovery of the ancient historical texts and the changing taste and expectations of the wider, wealthier and more diverse public of the courts and cities of the Italian peninsula, the fabulous aura that had surrounded Alexander for centuries evaporated. He was recast as the moral exemplum and valorous military commander spoken of by the newly available ancient historians, and became the protagonist of an unprecedently vast iconographic repertoire established in the course of the sixteenth century.

By discussing a body of artworks from 1160s to 1560s spanning several media (from illuminated manuscripts and frescoes to sculptural reliefs, wedding chests and tapestries) and researching this material in constant dialogue with the literary tradition, this book offers a reassessment of the whole visual tradition of Alexander in Renaissance Italy, making sense of a figurative repertoire often perceived as fragmentary and disparate, and casting new light on an overall still neglected chapter in the tradition of the myth of Alexander.

This book investigates the relationship between religion and material culture in prehistoric and historic settings.

Archaeologists, scholars of religion, theologians, and ancient historians explore the role of material culture in religion, in both the historical period and before. With points of departure in theory, method, and empirical evidence, the following questions are addressed: What types of material culture characterize “religion” as such? Is it possible to identify “religion” (in historical as well as prehistoric times) on the basis of material culture alone? How did the gradual invention of various forms of material culture - graves, images, objects, space, paraphernalia - make it possible for certain religious expressions to arise and to be constructed?

On one hand, the objective of the project is to expand the field of the history of religion beyond written texts. On the other hand, with regards to the prehistoric sources, looking to the material evidence rather than conceptual models allows us to discuss religion on the basis of the archaeological data, an important step forward.

Ludo Milis graduated from Ghent University in 1961 as the last student of François-Louis Ganshof, who in the years after Henri Pirenne’s retirement was the most prominent representative of the famous “Ghent School” of medieval history. Milis’s own academic career at Ghent span four decades in which he followed in the footsteps of his masters, yet also explored new directions. Like his predecessors, Milis always attached great importance to the critical examination of primary sources, but for him, such work must serve broader historical inquiry guided by a precise set of questions and methodological rigor. His interests lay primarily in the study of religious and cultural history, which previously had been neglected at Ghent; he was also a pioneer in the history of mentalities in the Low Countries. Milis’s research and thought found expression in several books, among which his Angelic Monks and Earthly men. Monasticism and its Meaning to Medieval Society (Boydell, 1992), translated into many languages, was probably the most influential.

This collection contains eleven essays published between 1969 and 1990. Most of them appeared in Dutch or French and have now been translated into English; two essays previously published in English were newly edited. All provide unique insight in the major themes of Milis’s work: the religious history of the Low Countries during the early and high Middle Ages, as well as the problem of religious conversion and persuasion; the rise of regular canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (also the subject of his doctoral dissertation on the order of Arrouaise, published in 1969); the uses of power and ideology; and the history of French Flanders. All bear witness to Milis’s inspiring ability to ask original, probing questions and to write historical syntheses accessible to a wide audience.

The collection is presented to Ludo Milis by his students on the occasion of his retirement and his sixty-fifth birthday.

S’alimenter est l’une des préoccupations essentielles des êtres vivants. Les êtres humains, cependant, ont très tôt donné au fait de se nourrir une signification qui dépasse l’exigence physiologique. La plupart des religions, ainsi, organisent le rapport au fait de manger, déterminent la valeur symbolique des différents aliments et définissent l’importance symbolique des différents moyens de préparer la nourriture. Elles définissent et régulent également la relation entre la nourriture et le divin.

Le présent ouvrage interroge, dans une perspective interdisciplinaire, la portée religieuse du rapport à la nourriture et décline la dimension sacrée des repas et de l’alimentation. Par des études de type diachronique et synchronique, il met en valeur des questions de fond à l'œuvre de l'Antiquité à nos jours et fait dialoguer les diverses méthodologies à l’œuvre dans l’étude du fait religieux (anthropologie, histoire, philosophie de la religion, sociologie, science des religions, théologie). Plusieurs contributions analysent les évolutions récentes en matière de rapport à l'alimentation et proposent des éclairages originaux sur le rapport au religieux hors des religions constituées.

This book gathers new work by scholars who share a common interest not only in the controversial texts of the period between 1378 and 1536, but also in how the use, geographical movement, and manipulation of texts contributed materially to the formation of groups and group identities. The period covered spans the traditional medieval/early modern divide and the concomitant transition from manuscript to print. The years between the eruption of the Great Schism and the outbreak of European reformations witnessed unprecedented rifts in communities, institutions, and alliances. Yet while the crises of this period gave rise to division, they also prompted new groups to coalesce, resulting in realignments of communication networks, readership, and textual circulation in Europe. The Councils of Constance and Basel facilitated the production and dissemination of vast quantities of documents. Movements challenging the Roman Church and efforts to reform the Church from within provoked a torrent of persuasive and polemical writings which gained further momentum with the introduction of printing. These new situations also fostered the development and expression of group identities, defined by doctrine, opposition, vernacularity, and a burgeoning sense of national self-consciousness. Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536 examines the textual and material circumstances of these developments.

The fruit of a sustained and close collaboration between historians, linguists and jurists working on the Christian, Muslim and Jewish societies of the Middle Ages, this book explores the theme of religious coexistence (and the problems it poses) from a resolutely comparative perspective. The authors concentrate on a key aspect of this coexistence: the legal status attributed to Jews and Muslims in Christendom and to dhimmīs in Islamic lands. What are the similarities and differences, from the point of view of the law, between the indigenous religious minority and the foreigner? What specific treatments and procedures in the courtroom were reserved for plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses belonging to religious minorities? What role did the law play in the segregation of religious groups? In limiting, combating, or on the contrary justifying violence against them? Through these questions, and through the innovative comparative method applied to them, this book offers a fresh new synthesis to these questions and a spur to new research.

The essays in this book bring to light and analyse the continuities and shifts in daily religious practices across Europe - from Portugal to Hungary and from Italy to the British Isles - in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. While some of these changes, such as the increasing use of rosaries and the resort to Ars Moriendi, were the consequence of the rise of a more personal and interiorized faith, other changes had different causes. These included the spreading of the Reformation over Europe, the expulsion or compulsory conversion of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, and the conquest of large portions of eastern Christianity by the Turks - all of which forced people, who suddenly found that they had become religious minorities, to adopt new ways of living and new strategies for expressing their religiosity.

By recovering and analysing the cultural dynamics and connections between religious power, knowledge, culture, and practices, this collection reconsiders and enriches our understanding of one of the most critical phases of Europe’s cultural history. At the same time, it challenges existing narratives of the development of (early) modern identities that still, all too often, dominate the self-understanding of contemporary European society.

This volume examines forms of interaction between monastic or mendicant communities and lay people in the high Middle Ages in Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. The nineteen papers explore these issues in geographically and chronologically diverse settings in a way that no English-language collection has yet attempted. It brings together the latest research from established as well as younger historians. The first section ‘Patrons and Benefactors: power, fashion, and mutual expectations’ examines lay involvement in foundations, the rights held by patrons, and how they used these powers, as well as networks of relationships within broader groups of benefactors. The authors demonstrate how changing fashions shaped the fortunes of particular orders and houses and explore how power relations between different types of patrons and benefactors - royal figures, kinship, and other social groupings - affected the mutual expectations of the various parties. The second section of the volume, entitled ‘Lay and Religious: negotiation, influence, and utility’, shows how lay people’s ideas of the role of religious houses could impact upon their patronage of, and support for, monastic or mendicant institutions. Conversely, religious communities offered multi-faceted benefits - practical, intellectual, or spiritual - for the secular world. The book concludes by focusing on the rapid growth of confraternities, their relation to their urban mendicant and monastic contexts, and how the role and forms of confraternities evolved in the late medieval period.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam have coexisted in Europe for over 1300 years. The three monotheistic faiths differ in demography, in the moment of their arrival on the continent and in the unequal relations they maintain with power: Christianity was chosen by a large number of inhabitants and became - in spite of important differences according to place and time -a religion of state. The organization of the continent into states and the divisions within Christianity often placed minorities in an unstable and at times painful situation. This partially explains the fight against "heresies", the wars of religions, the expulsion of Jews from several European kingdoms (as well as the expulsion of Muslims from Sicily and the Iberian peninsula), the "Jewish question" in the 19th century up until the Holocaust. Since the 20th century, the debates concerning Islam and concerning public expression of religion are shaped in part by this past.

The 13 studies gathered in this volume explore the ways in which states have treated their religious minorities. We study various policies - repression, supervision, integration, tolerance, secularization, indifference - as well as the many ways in which minorities have accommodated the majority’s demands. The relation is by no means one-sided: on the contrary, state policies have created resistance, negotiation (on the legal, political, and cultural fronts) or compromise. Through these precise and original examples, we can see how the protagonists (states, religious institutions, the elite, the faithful) interact, try to convince or influence each other in order to transform practices, invent and implement common norms and grounds, all the while knowing the confessional dimension of "religious" majority and minority does not fully embrace the identity of each citizen in full.

Medieval memoria - the commemoration of the dead - was both a form of collective memory and a social practice present in every sphere of life. It shaped identities and constituted groups, and thus the study of commemorative practices can tell us a great deal about medieval communities. This study shows the importance of memoria as a form of collective memory for different groups and institutions: city government and guilds, the Teutonic Order, bishops and cathedral chapters, and monastic communities, in late medieval Livonia (present-day Latvia and Estonia).

Female monks have been discussed within the spheres of socio-history, theology, and literary analysis, but no comprehensive study has focused on their historical and gendered context until now. This book reexamines their hagiographies to reveal that female protagonists possess a holy womanhood regardless of having layers of masculinity applied to their characters. Each masculine layer is scrutinized to explore its purpose in the plots and the plausible motivations for the utilization of transvestite figures in religious literature. Hagiographers had no intention of transforming their religious protagonists into anything but determined, holy women who are forced to act drastically in order to sustain ascetic dreams begun while mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. Through an intertextual method, masculinity and literary themes work to contextualize praise for a holy womanhood within an acceptable gendered language, which seems to support a belief in the spiritual potential of women. This book highlights the potential for complex irony to develop around a female transvestite, which supplies religious tales with intrigue and interest, an ability to instruct/chastise mixed audiences, and a potential to portray the reversal inherent in the human drama of salvation.

Dr. Crystal Lynn Lubinsky received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Ecclesiastical History and currently lectures on ancient history and religious studies for the History Department and Religious Studies Program at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in the United States. Her research interests and future projects include andromimesis, instances of Christian reversal and redemption, monasteries as refuge, and the Christian Desert Myth.

Le volume est destiné à attirer l 'attention des chercheurs sur les possibilitès nouvelles offertes par l'utilisation de l' ordinateur dans les divers domaines d'étude du moyen âge. Il s'adresse à tous les médiévistes soucieux de faire le point concemant l' aide que l'informatique peut apporter à ceux qui étudient les textes médiévaux sous leurs différents aspects.

Les exposés sont orientés autour de deux axes principaux : les instruments de travail disponibles et les possibilites d'analyse des textes. Les médiévistes trouveront dans les pages qui suivent une série de contributions destinées à leur montrer l'aide qu'ils sont en droit d'attendre de l'informatique pour repérer les manuscrits d'une oeuvre, pour en faire une description codicologique, pour préparer des éditions critiques ou pour dresser la bibliographie d'un sujet donné.

Depuis quelques années, les banques et les bases de données se sont multipliées et deviennent accessibles à tous. Les ordinateurs personnels et portables ont changé profondément la manière de travailler. Il est désormais possible d'avoir accès à de grands ensembles de textes, de repérer plus facilement les sources utilisées par les auteurs du moyen âge et d'identifier citations ou réminiscences. Les oeuvres peuvent être analysées tant au niveau lexicographique que conceptuel à l'aide des concordances et index qui ont été réalisés. Il a donc semblé utile de montrer comment les spécialistes pouvaient exploiter ces instruments de travail nouveaux.

Ce volume rassemble les contributions présentées au cours du colloque international tenu à Cracovie en juin 1993. La S.I.E.P.M. avait choisi comme thème de sa rencontre annuelle Société et Église. Textes et discussions dans les universités d'Europe centrale à la fin du moyen âge. Cette période marque une intense activité dans les universités d'Europe centrale et on constate que l'université de Prague va y jouer un rôle de premier plan.

Les problèmes des relations entre l'Église et la societe, de la conception et de la reforme de l'Église, du conciliarisme, du hussitisme, ainsi que les questions sociales et économiques donnèrent lieu à des discussions très vives à Cracovie et à Prague, de même que dans d'autres universites d'Europe centrale vers la fin du moyen âge. L'Université de Prague fut pendant le XIVe siècle un centre intellectuel de première importance pour toute la chrétienté.

Les communications des différents conferenciers nous introduisent done au coeur de la vie intellectuelle de 'Europe centrale pendant la fin du moyen âge. Cette période est moins bien connue. L'ouvrage permet d'avoir un aperçu de l'activité culturelle dans une région qui a joué un rôle déterminant pendant le moyen âge tardif.

Embrassant toutes les strates du langage, de sa production à sa réception, les formes vers et prose sont dans une tension constante et évolutive, et invitent à s’interroger sur ce qui les sépare et les réunit, d’un point de vue parfois strictement linguistique, parfois plus largement rythmique, générique ou idéologique. Aussi travaillée soit-elle, la question des formes et des usages résiste toutefois à une théorisation générale, en raison de l’ampleur du phénomène et des présupposés culturels qu’elle engage. L’aborder sous l’angle de la rencontre, « rencontre » en son sens premier de « conflit », mais aussi en celui de « cohabitation, dialogue, échange », est une manière de contourner la difficulté. Ces rencontres, au pluriel donc, se produisent en effet dans divers lieux textuels, et à divers moments, du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, dans une longue période où se dessinent et se formulent en langue française les expériences et les réflexions et où se dévoilent des imaginaires singuliers. Elles s’éclairent en outre à la lumière des pratiques enregistrées dans les langues voisines. La diversité et la complexité des formules révèlent que le jeu des formes est au cœur de l’identité des langues et de l’image mentale qu’elles renvoient.

Catherine Croizy-Naquet

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent essentiellement sur la littérature narrative médiévale, romans et récits historiques, en vers et en prose.

Michelle Szkilnik

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent sur le roman arthurien et sur la littérature de la fi n du Moyen Âge.

Pour taus les historiens des sciences, René Taton (né en 1915) est un des pères fondateurs de leur discipline. Si son nom demeure attaché à l' Histoire générale des sciences, il est l'auteur de bien d'autres travaux sur l'histoire des sciences exactes et des milieux scientifiques. Dans son séminaire, déjà légendaire, du Centre Alexandre Koyré, il a forme des générations de chercheurs, aujourd'hui actifs dans le monde entier. Pour son quatre-vingt-cinquième anniversaire, ses élèves et ses amis lui offrent un recueil de ses articles choisis par lui-même.

À l’occasion du 6e centenaire de la naissance de René, duc d’Anjou et comte de Provence, ce volume pluridisciplinaire propose des perspectives nouvelles sur l’action d’un prince qui, malgré ses déboires politiques, fut un écrivain subtil et un mécène curieux de tous les arts. Sont abordés l’œuvre littéraire de René d’Anjou (Livre du Cœur d’amour épris, Mortifiement de vaine plaisance, Traité et devis de la forme d’un tournoi), mais aussi sa bibliothèque, sa politique culturelle, les écrivains et artistes à son service, les spectacles curiaux, reflet de goûts littéraires et de l’imaginaire de la fin du Moyen Âge. La personnalité du prince apparaît particulièrement riche de sens, en ce qu’il se situe au carrefour de la féodalité (dont il fut l’un des derniers grands représentants, à une époque où s’affirmait le pouvoir royal) et de l’humanisme (dont René eut un avant-goût par les liens qui l’attachaient à l’Italie).

This book brings together a group of leading experts on the political history of Germany and the medieval Empire from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Its purpose is to introduce and analyze key concepts in the study of medieval political culture. The representation of power by means of texts, buildings and images is a theme which has long interested historians. However, recent debates and methodological insights have fundamentally altered the way this subject is perceived, opening it up to perspectives unnoticed by its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century. By taking account of these debates and insights, this volume explores a series of fundamental questions. How was power defined in a medieval context? How was it claimed, legitimized and disputed? What were the moral parameters against which its exercise was judged? How did different spheres of political power interact? What roles were played by texts, images and rituals in the maintenance of, and challenges to, the political order? The contributors bring varied and original approaches to these and other questions, illuminating the complex power relationships which determined the changing political history of medieval Germany.

Que représente la Grèce et les Grecs, pour les auteurs et les artistes des xiv e au xvi e siècle, en Europe occidentale ? Le présent volume explore cette question du point de vue de la perception et de l’imagination spatiales et géographiques. Il porte ainsi sur les représentations de l’espace grec, ancien et « moderne » du xiv e au xvi e siècle. En privilégiant des œuvres latines, françaises et italiennes, écrites principalement en Italie, en France, dans les Pays-Bas bourguignons et en Grèce, il étudie comment les auteurs et les artistes figurent textuellement et visuellement la géographie de la Grèce / de l’espace ou des espaces grec(s). Les difficultés pour définir, nommer et représenter la Grèce comme entité territoriale sont nombreuses durant ces siècles marqués par de très profonds bouleversements, avec du côté grec l’effondrement de l’empire byzantin et, du côté de l’Europe occidentale, des évolutions nombreuses dans les connaissances géographiques, historiques et aussi linguistiques, ainsi que dans les formes d’expression textuelles et iconographiques. La perception d’une identité spatiale, géographique, de la Grèce est d’autant plus délicate que plusieurs temporalités sont en jeu, celle de la Grèce ancienne, celle de la Grèce contemporaine aux auteurs, celle aussi de la Grèce médiévale antérieure au xiv e siècle. Les études réunies s’interrogent sur les différentes perceptions et représentations de l’espace grec, dans son unité et/ou sa diversité, qui s’expriment et se renouvellent durant ces trois siècles, ainsi que sur la nomination des lieux grecs et de la Grèce qui les accompagnent.

Continuity and change enclose a problem field that is fundamental to the interpretation of historical material. On the one hand the notions that are necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative: continuity, tradition, constancy, consistency, identity; on the other those that provide an impetus or drive to that account: change, innovation, rupture, or discontinuity.

Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change explores the historiographical question of the modes of interrelation between these motifs in historical narratives. The essays in the collection attempt to realize theoretical consciousness through historical narrative ‘in practice’, by discussing selected historical topics from Western cultural history, within the disciplines of history, literature, visual arts, musicology, archaeology, philosophy, and theology.

The title Resonances indicates the overall perspective of the book: how connotations of past meanings may resonate through time, in new contexts, assuming new meanings without surrendering the old.

Landscape archaeology has, in recent years, expanded as a discipline to include various aspects of human-environment interactions in the past. In line with this trend, this volume offers a comprehensive perspective on three topics: theoretical and textual approaches to landscape, which provides an important framework for interdisciplinary research; the use of land and resources, which, while a popular topic in Southwest Asian archaeology, remains relatively understudied in connection to ancient technologies; and human impact on the highlands. The contributions gathered in this volume cover topics as diverse as agricultural practices, metallurgy, trade, and environmental research, and draw together evidence from both textual and material evidence to shed light on different places and periods from the Bronze Age through to the Roman era. Together, these varied case studies offer new insights into how different methods can be utilized to assess unique patterns in human-environment interactions in Southwest Asia.

Moral philosophy, and particularly ethics, was among the most contested disciplines in the Renaissance, as philosophers, theologians, and literary scholars all laid claim to it, while an expanding canon of sources made the ground shift under their feet. In this volume, eleven specialists drawn from literature, intellectual history, philosophy, and religious studies examine the configuration of ethics and how it changed in the period from Petrarch to Descartes. They show that the contexts in which ethics was explored, the approaches taken to it, and the conclusions it reached make Renaissance ethics something worthy of exploration in its own right, in distinction to both medieval and early modern ethics. Particular attention is given to the development of new audiences, settings, genres (essays, dialogues, commonplace books, biographies, short fiction), and mediums (especially the vernacular) in ethical discussions, as well as the continuities with the formal exploration of ethics through commentaries. Renaissance ethics emerges as a highly eclectic product, which combined Christian insights with the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions while increasingly incorporating elements from Stoicism and Epicureanism. This volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers who wish to gain an overall view of how ethics developed throughout Europe in response to the cultural, historical, and religious changes between 1350 and 1650.

Revealing Women offers a detailed and textually oriented investigation of the roles and functions of female characters in Gnostic Christian mythologies. It answers questions such as: to what end did Gnostic Christian theologians employ feminine imagery in their theology? What did they want to convey through it?

This book shows that feminine imagery was a genuine concern for Gnostic theologians, and it enquires about how it was employed to describe the divine through a contextual reading of Gnostic Christian texts presenting Ophite, Sethian, Barbeloite and Valentinian mythologoumena and theologoumena. Overall, it argues that feminine imagery ought to be acknowledged as an important theological framework to investigate and contextualize Gnostic works by showing that these theologians used feminine imagery to exemplify those aspects of the Godhead which they considered paradoxical and, yet, essential. The claims made in the first chapters are later substantiated by an in-depth investigation of understudied Gnostic texts, such as the so-called Simonian Gnostic works, the Book of Baruch of the Gnostic teacher Justin and the Nag Hammadi treatise known as Exegesis of the Soul.

Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century offers analytical introductions to the biographical and academic trajectories as well as the scholarly contributions of the most important medievalists of the 20th century, privileging the contexts in which their influential texts in modern medieval studies were articulated and their effect on subsequent approaches to the field. The volume pays tribute to the medievalists-historians, philologists, literary critics, philosophers, historians of art and science, and theologians-whose work effectively forged contemporary academics and acknowledges a debt of gratitude for the trail they blazed in the twentieth century. An introductory essay provides a comprehensive examination of the development of historiographical perspectives on medieval studies as shaped by the subjects of the volume, contextualizing the individual chapters and offering a critical reconsideration of the manifold ways in which medievalism has been inscribed. The chapters in the book develop from interdisciplinary and transversal strategies which reflect the kind of originative work enacted by both the subjects of the volume and the scholars who write about them. A concluding essay summarizes the place of the medievalists in relation to their professional identity, to the time in which they worked, and to the national spaces that marked their scholarly production.

This is the third volume of the series “Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century”, focused this time on the medieval political thought.

This book offers an overview of the national and transnational traditions of the historiography and studies the main questions and the background of this discipline in the last century.

Essays for this new volume focus on the subject’s life, intellectual and academic training; discuss major works and historiographical heritage; and locate the medievalists who have contributed to the better understanding of medieval political thought, through their work in medieval studies. This interdisciplinary resource aims to include medievalists from different fields: history, art, literature, theology, among others.

A modest man of great accomplishments, Walahfrid Strabo was a fine poet, teacher, abbot, gardener, liturgist, and diplomat. His personal notebook reveals that he loved arithmetic and astronomy. For a decade, he tutored Carolus iunior, youngest son of Judith and Ludwig der Fromme, who became emperor Charles the Bald. On two occasions, Walahfrid found and transcribed formulae and explanations of time series, often correcting them.

By identifying Walahfrid's sources and scripts, Professor Stevens is able to trace his life and scholarship, as they relate to Carolingian politics and schools in the first half of ninth-century Europe.

The early seventeenth-century English sermon was the bestselling print genre of its time, and church preaching was more widely attended than any play. Jennifer Clement argues here that a major aim of these sermons was to teach people how to feel the right emotions — or, as preachers would have said at the time, the passions or affections — to lead a good Christian life. In the process, preachers took a primarily rhetorical approach to the emotions; that is, they used their sermons to define emotions and to encourage their listeners and readers actively to cultivate and shape their emotions in line with Scripture.

This study offers an overview of five key emotions — love, fear, anger, grief, and joy – in the sermons of key preachers such as John Donne, Richard Sibbes, Joseph Hall, Launcelot Andrewes, and others. It shows how these preachers engaged with contemporary treatises on the emotions as well as treatises on preaching to highlight the importance of the rhetorical, as opposed to the humoral, approach to understanding the emotions in a religious context. In addition, Clement reads sermons next to early seventeenth-century religious poetry by writers such as Donne, George Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, and Henry Vaughan to show how the emotional concerns of the sermons also appear in the poetry, reverberating beyond the pulpit.

Bringing together rhetorical theory, sermon studies, and the history of the emotions, Clement shows how the early seventeenth-century English sermon needs to inform our thinking about literature and its engagement with emotion in this period.

During the Renaissance and at the beginning of the early modern times, with the origin of philology and the advent of a new knowledge linked to the development of print and the discovery of the New World, the art of dialectic, in the traditional Aristotelian sense, changes and finds new applications.

The creation of a public arena for discussions is linked to the development of the rhetorical resources as an appropriation of a history and a language inside a specific community of some authors with their own cultural and social characteristics. Meanwhile they don’t stop to insert their own works in the continuity or in the remains of the Antiquity.Because of the great events shaping the whole European history from the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, rhetoric is not separated from religion: every rhetorical practice is based upon the representation of the truth, the evaluation of the principles and the profession of faith.

Dominique de Courcelles is a research director at the French Center for scientific research (CNRS), UMR 5037 CERPHI

Although Macrobius’ work has been understood as a source likely to engage erudite interest, above all in the area of ancient Roman religion, the absence of studies emphasizing the Saturnalia’s (written c. 430 AD) literary and rhetorical aspects is unfortunate. Macrobius elaborates an innovative project for the writing of this carefully fashioned banquet. At the origin of this silence, Quellenforschung clearly ignored that the author had taken up the challenge of collecting the vast multiplicity of knowledge into an organic whole through coherent construction. Thanks to the system of readings allotted to the twelve specialized speakers who are present, Macrobius creates a living encyclopedia of ancient times. The terms of reference in which each person undertakes a speech, composes it and eventually passes it along to his neighbor, who in turn offers his own contribution to the knowledge that takes shape, inform us about the idea of discourse which the work authorizes, and which obviously constitutes a singular advancement in the definition of sermo doctus.

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, Paris, and an Agrégé de lettres classiques, Benjamin Goldlust is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon 3 - Jean Moulin. His research work focuses mainly on Late Latin Literature.

Ce poème moyen-anglais relate les exploits du roi Richard Coeur de Lion lors de la troisième croisade. Il occupe une place à part dans le corpus des romans moyen-anglais du fait que son héros est un roi anglais et que les événements racontés sont historiques. Cependant, au fil des réécritures, la vérité historique est progressivement déformée et le roi Richard devient un héros de roman. Sous sa forme définitive ce texte se singularise par la présence d’éléments macabres et en particulier de scènes de cannibalisme. Très célèbre de son temps, encore édité au xvi e siècle, le poème est redécouvert au xix e siècle et notamment exploité par Walter Scott.

Ce volume présente, à côté du texte moyen-anglais dans l’édition de Larkin (2015), la première traduction française du poème. Les notes et l’introduction attachent une importance toute particulière à l’étude des sources et à l’élaboration du texte version après version.

Employing a blend of historical, philological, literary, and linguistic methods, Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil paints a full-bodied portrait of Richard Rowlands Verstegan (or Verstegen, 1550?-1640) - a man whose multiple and variously spelled name reflects a multifaceted public personality. English by birth and upbringing, Dutch by fatherly descent, Verstegan spent most of his life on the Continent, employed intermittently as a Catholic spy, poet, religious translator, polemicist, and philologist. While this many-sidedness is typical of the Renaissance period, some of Verstegan’s interests and positions were innovative or extravagant - witness his familiarization of the epigram in the Netherlands (1617), or his description of Teutonic England in the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605). In this collection of essays, Verstegan’s life and works are both explored in themselves and as mirrors of his times. As each contributor investigates one or more aspects of Verstegan’s careers, a wider perspective is created of English and Dutch religious politics, of the prevailing literary modes and fashions of the period, and of the picture that Europe was beginning to paint for itself. Conversely, this all-encompassing view demonstrates the centrality of a figure who has long been relegated to the margins of English, Dutch, and European history.

This book offers new and innovative perspectives on long-distance trade between Europe, the Mediterranean area, the Middle East, Africa, India and China during the Early Medieval period. The archaeological data and historical insights presented in this volume are without exception of great interest, often exciting, and more than once astonishing. The goods which travelled between the continents in the timespan under discussion (ca. 6th to 12th centuries) include pottery in all shapes and forms, textiles, coins, metal, lava millstones, glass, marble columns, rock-crystal beads, and also plants used for incense. The scope of the contributions includes the wide-ranging economic contacts of a Viking community, the changing patterns of long-distance trade in the Byzantine Empire, the spread of Chinese pottery to Africa, the Near East and Europe, the information on maritime routes provided by shipwrecks in the Java Sea, the reconstruction of an incense trade network, and the production and distribution of textiles as well as stone objects in the Middle East and beyond. The varied approaches in this volume underline that the movement of objects in Early Medieval times over vast distances not only reflect mechanisms of exchange, but also imply social networks and the transfer of ideas. Thus, Riches Beyond the Horizon sheds compelling light on a world which was much more complex and much more interconnected than has often been assumed.

Rievaulx abbey was one of the most prominent houses of white monks (Cistercians) in England, and became in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an important feature of the ecclesiastical and social landscape of Yorkshire. The present work is the first in-depth study devoted to Rievaulx's social history. The abbey's once extensive archives were largely destroyed after the Dissolution, but the surviving late-twelfth-century cartulary provides a fascinating insight into the process of creating institutional memory, preserving and shaping information about various neighbours of the abbey, and creating a 'map' of social networks that developed around Rievaulx. The complex picture of building and sustaining connections between the abbey and its lay patrons, benefactors and neighbours forms a core to this book. This study also examines how Rievaulx  co-existed with other religious institutions in the area, and particularly the practical dimension of friendships between abbots, declarations of mutual support between monastic communities, and how these were reconciled with a fierce competition for land and donations. Contacts between Rievaulx abbey and the nearby archbishops of York and bishops of Durham were intense and these contacts demonstrate how important these prelates were as potential supporters, and how broader ecclesiastical issues influenced their relationships with Rievaulx. Whilst exploring the case of one particular monastery this book is an important contribution to the current debate on the shaping of Cistercian practice, and particularly the mechanisms for the interaction between laity and monastic communities, during the High Middle Ages.

What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?

This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.

This volume presents a thorough study of the more than a thousand preserved Danish medieval rural parish churches. It traces the transformations of church interiors from c. 1450 to 1600 (thus covering both the emergence and impact of the Danish Reformation) by interpreting material changes within a broad historical perspective that highlights changes in religious practices and liturgy. The book explores the spatial and artistic implications of liturgy as well as the role of the congregation, the donor, and the clergy both in shaping and disrupting these interiors. It sets out to answer four basic questions: What did these rural churches look like by the middle of the fifteenth century? How did they change from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth? How were they used and integrated into public as well as private ceremonies? And how may these churches have been perceived and experienced by the congregation and clergy?

This study seeks to establish a methodological framework that incorporates the disciplines of archaeology, art history, history, and theology, in order to facilitate an overall understanding of the architectural setting, embracing spatial, material, and artistic elements within the church through liturgy.

Thanks largely to the introduction of new methods of recovery and analysis, archaeology is increasingly treated as a science. Yet, it should continue to ask questions that are founded in the humanities. This is especially true of social archaeology, which forms the core of this volume. Being based on the notion that ‘the social’ permeates all areas of life, the chapters gathered here give priority to archaeological data and contexts, which in turn form the prerequisite for analyzing how, at particular times and places, people negotiated or reaffirmed the society around them. Case studies from the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean sit alongside selected comparative cases from other parts of the world and assess issues such as the development of cultural characteristics of societies, societal continuity and collapse, religious beliefs and rituals, and the role of social memory, as well as interactions within and between societies. The volume is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend, Dr. Sharon Zuckerman, who embraced the quest for ‘the social’ throughout her career.

La violence occupe une place paradoxale dans le bouddhisme tantrique tibétain. Alors que l’impératif éthique de ne pas nuire aux êtres est absolument central, l’activité rituelle comporte une face beaucoup plus sombre, une face de pouvoir et de violence : celle du repoussement et de la destruction du mal. Toute une machinerie rituelle est déployée pour écarter ou tuer des démons hostiles, voire des « ennemis » aux contours vagues - la magie noire n’est pas absente. De terribles divinités protectrices sont incitées à tuer, à battre, à réduire en morceaux… Comment comprendre l’importance de cette modalité violente dans le contexte bouddhique ?

La question est d’autant plus intrigante qu’il existe un type de spécialiste religieux tibétain fortement associé à ce versant problématique du domaine rituel : le ngakpa, ou tantriste. Contrairement au moine, ce religieux spécialisé dans les rituels tantriques ne prononce pas de voeux monastiques. Qui sont les tantristes, et comment comprendre qu’un spécialiste bouddhique soit associé à l’exercice de rituels violents ? Pour répondre à cette interrogation, l’auteur nous fait découvrir une communauté villageoise de tantristes située dans la bordure himalayenne du monde tibétain, dans une haute vallée du nord du Népal. Le regard anthropologique porté sur ces religieux et leur société, sur leurs rituels et leurs questionnements éthiques permet de faire émerger des éléments de cohérence qui sous-tendent l’association des tantristes à des rituels de violence. Cette contribution importante à l’anthropologie du bouddhisme tibétain apporte un éclairage nouveau pour penser la violence de l’exorcisme et, à travers la dualité du moine et du tantriste, les champs religieux marqués par la présence de différentes formes de spécialisation religieuse.

Fontevraud: 1101-2001. Fontevraud: à la fois monastère et congrégation, communauté mixte où, par la singulière volonté du fondateur, les hommes en ce temps féodal étaient soumis au pouvoir des femmes. Célébrer le neuvième centenaire de la fondation de Robert d’Arbrissel s’imposait; ce qui fut fait du 13 au 16 décembre 2001, dans l’enceinte même de la somptueuse abbaye ligérienne.

Le présent volume témoigne de ces denses journées d’étude; il intègre aussi des contributions supplémentaires, pour gagner encore en richesse et en cohérence. Volontairement déroutant, il nous entraîne d’abord bien loin du Val de Loire, dans les solitudes boisées des Apennins, où le ressourcement monastique surgi du haut Moyen Âge inaugure ce Moyen Âge que nous disons central. Les organisateurs scientifiques de la rencontre n’ont en effet pas souhaité la focaliser d’emblée sur l’originalité de Fontevraud et les étranges comportements de son fondateur. Ils ont au contraire voulu donner à lire l’accident de 1101 dans le vaste élan qui ouvre une ère nouvelle pour la Chrétienté et pour notre monde en ce qu’il en procède: cette réforme de l’Église qu’on dit «grégorienne», qui repense en fait toute l’architecture ecclésiale et sociale, des plus hauts aux plus infimes pouvoirs, des institutions aux individus et du sacré au profane.

Roger II (c. 1095-1154), Sicily’s first king, was an anomaly for his time. An ambitious new ruler who lacked the distinguished lineage so prized by the nobility, and a leader of an extraordinarily diverse population on the fringes of Europe, he occupied a Roger II (c. 1095-1154), Sicily’s first king, was an anomaly for his time. An ambitious new ruler who lacked the distinguished lineage so prized by the nobility, and a leader of an extraordinarily diverse population on the fringes of Europe, he occupied a unique space in the continent’s charged political landscape. This interdisciplinary study examines the strategies that Roger used to legitimize his authority, including his relationships with contemporary rulers, the familial connections that he established through no less than three marriages, and his devotion to the Church and Saint Nicholas of Myra/Bari. Yet while Roger and his family made the most of their geographic and cultural contexts, it is convincingly argued here that they nonetheless retained a strong western focus, and that behind the diverse mélange of Norman Sicily were very occidental interests.

Drawing together sources of political, social, and religious history from locations as disparate as Spain and the Byzantine Empire, as well as evidence from the magnificent churches and elaborate mosaics constructed during his reign, this volume offers a fascinating portrait of a figure whose rule was characterized both by great potential and devastating tragedy. Indeed, had Roger been able to accomplish his ambitious agenda, the history of the medieval Mediterranean world would have unfolded very