Brepols

This volume examines the efforts of medieval religious communities and orders to bring stability to the dynamic complexity of organized religious life. By focusing on legislative structures and normative documents (rules, customaries, constitutions), the authors address not only such matters as the meaning of these texts and the motivations behind them, but also the evolving conditions of their production and use, the internal politics of institutional change, and the reality of “precept not practice.” These papers thus present spiritual principles and social practices in their historical and functional contexts, confront normative programs with formative processes, and explain distinctive modes and models of life within the broader landscape of medieval organized religion..

Johannes Elith Østrup (1867-1938), son of a Danish farmer, philologist of Turkish and Semitic languages, and later Vice Chancellor of Copenhagen University, spent 1891-1893 travelling by horse around Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia. Unlike most European travellers, his language skills allowed him to chat with locals in cafés, stay in people’s homes, and travel with the Bedouin. A curious young man, Østrup travelled with eyes, ears, and mind open to the unknown, and recorded his journey in this lively travelogue, Skiftende horizonter (1894). His writing offers a vivid account of his time in the region, and dwells with equal interest on both the region’s broader political, ethnic, and religious struggles, and the day-to-day concerns of those who lived there.

Now, for the first time, this text is available to English-speaking readers thanks to this translation by Cisca Spencer, Østrup’s great granddaughter and a former Australian diplomat. With a foreword by Rubina Raja, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, together with Østrup’s own photographs and new maps, this volume captures all the charm and enthusiasm of the original in bringing this nineteenth-century travelogue to a modern readership.

Commentaries on authoritative texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages are increasingly being recognized as witnesses to a rich tradition of cultural reception and intellectual engagement. This renewed interest goes hand-in-hand with an increased demand for critical editions of the texts in question. However, the genre of the commentary presents a number of specific challenges to the editor, challenges related to the textual dynamic, the presentation on the page, and the intertwined transmission history of the commentary and the authoritative text that forms its subject. This volume brings together twelve case studies on texts written in Greek and Latin, which range from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages. Touching upon a variety of fields, including literature, theology, philosophy, medicine, and law, these case studies offer an interdisciplinary perspective on commentaries on authoritative texts and the editors’ challenging work to accurately reconstruct and present them.

Sigebert de Gembloux (1028 env. - 5 octobre 1112) s'est illustré en des genres littéraires très divers, le point culminant de son œuvre étant sans conteste sa Chronique qui constitue, comme l'écrit très justement M. Chazan, « un des sommets de l'historiographie médiévale ».

La recherche à son sujet ne cesse d'évoluer, et l’ouvrage qu’on présente ici en est sans conteste un précieux jalon. Il est la conclusion d’une rencontre qui se tint à Bruxelles et à Gembloux les 5 et 6 octobre 2012. Point de départ plus qu’aboutissement, cette rencontre a ouvert des perspectives neuves autant que variées. S'y croisent les points de vue de l'historien, de l'archéologue et du philologue qui se penchent sur le personnage, l'oeuvre et son terreau, l'abbaye de Gembloux. Ce recueil ne prétend pas à l’exhaustivité - l’est-on jamais en aussi riche matière où de plus l’enquête ne cesse d’évoluer ? On reconnaîtra en filigrane les traces d’autres recherches en cours sur le même sujet, auxquelles d’ailleurs les textes font de fréquentes références. Il y a donc deux cohérences, celle de l’ensemble des articles présentés ici, qui couvrent un large éventail dont les sujets s’enchaînent et se répondent, et celle qui englobe d’autres écrits importants tenant au même objet. Ainsi, le présent ouvrage contribue sans aucun doute à l’avancement des études sigebertiennes.

Les contributions sont dues à M. Chazan (U. Lorraine), M. De Waha (ULB), J. Meyers (U. Montpellier), Ph. Mignot (Dir° arch. Wall.), P. Tombeur (UCL), W. Verbaal (UGent), M. Verweij (KBR Bruxelles)

Surgida en la remota Antigüedad, la leyenda de los signa iudicii ha permeado tradiciones y pueblos, culturas y religiones diversas, durante siglos. En todo ese tiempo, esta relación de signos que precederán al fin del mundo ha sufrido variada suerte, desde la gran productividad que presentó durante los albores de la apocalíptica, con un primitivo catálogo de siete señales ampliado paulatinamente, pasando por un uso pragmático y proselitista durante el período medieval, hasta su eclipse con la llegada del racionalismo epistemológico. Se trata de un repertorio de señales escatológicas de amplia naturaleza (atmosférica, legendaria, geológica, espiritual) que buscaba impactar en el imaginario social y colectivo a través de lo que hemos denominado factor miedo. La materia tuvo inmensa repercusión en las tradiciones gaélica, anglosajona o latina, y la recogen desde autores como Lactancio, Orígenes o Comodiano, hasta el mismo Agustín de Hipona. Posteriormente, su difusión fue dilatada, primero a través de varios teóricos y exégetas del cristianismo durante los siglos X, XI y XII, y más tarde de mano de los autores en lenguas vernáculas occidentales. A partir del siglo XIII se introduce en la Península Ibérica, inaugurándose con un texto que Gonzalo de Berceo dedicó a los muy grandes signos ante [...] del Judicio cabdal. Paralelamente a las versiones cristianas, destaca la incidencia que la materia tuvo entre varios autores musulmanes peninsulares a lo largo de los siglos.

Les Evangélistes se souvenaient d’un vieillard nommé Siméon, qui était juste et qui devait attendre, aussi longtemps qu’il le faudrait, la venue du Sauveur annoncé par les Écritures. Lorsqu’il vit Jésus, il sut que cette attente interminable prenait fin, attesta que Jésus était bien ce Sauveur et demanda au Seigneur de le rappeler enfin à lui. Les Juifs se souvenaient également d’un personnage nommé Siméon le Juste. Pendant la première partie de sa vie il avait fait partie de la Grande Assemblée où siégeaient les derniers prophètes et avait parlé d’une seule voix avec eux, puis il s’était laissé séduire par les beautés de l’hellénisme, ce qui lui avait valu de mourir à la moitié de ses jours. Par des biais différents, Juifs et Chrétiens s’accordaient à faire de ce Siméon de légende le symbole d’un passé révolu. Derrière la légende se cache l’histoire d’un grand prêtre de la période hellénistique, Siméon fils d’Onias. Sa famille, originaire d’Egypte, avait obtenu des rois grecs d’Alexandrie la charge héréditaire de grand prêtre du Temple de Jérusalem, une charge que Siméon occupa de 220 à 195 avant notre ère. Pour Jésus ben Sira, son contemporain, il avait été, avant tout, celui qui «avait fondé la double hauteur», ce qui signifiait qu’il avait doublé le sens superficiel de la Bible hébraïque d’un sens allégorique caché sous les lettres même de l’Écriture. Aussi improbable que puisse nous paraître une telle thèse, elle méritait d’être vérifiée. Et effectivement, ce monument «à double hauteur» enfoui sous les alluvions de plus de vingt siècles d’histoire de l’interprétation du texte biblique est demeuré intact.

Maître de conférences d’hébreu biblique et de littérature intertestamentaire à l’Université Nancy II de 1970 à 1978, puis de 1981 à 2005 à l’Université Jean Moulin de Lyon, Bernard Barc a été aussi professeur invité à l’Université Laval à Quebec de 1978 à 1980, dans le cadre de l’Edition des textes de la Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi (BCNH). Il est l’auteur de plusieurs volumes de la Bibliothèque Copte ainsi que de publications relatives à l’histoire de l’herméneutique juive ancienne.

This study of sixteenth-century Antwerp and its surroundings is an attempt to combine commercial explanation models concerning the impact of great towns on their surrounding countryside with an approach in which institutional factors, and especially property relations, play the major role. It focuses on four types of influence of Antwerp on its surroundings:

- the demographic impact

- the increasing urban demand for agrarian products

-the impact of the urban economy on non-agrarian types of labour in the countryside and

- the purchases of land and other investments made by Antwerp citizens and their impact on the property relations in the surrounding countryside

Within the framework of these four fields of interaction between town and countryside, three essential questions have to be answered: First, how can we characterize the urban influence in each of these fields? Can it be considered a stimulus for the rural economy or rather an obstacle? Second, what was the economic response of the rural economy to the urban impact? Did it respond by specializing, according to the model presented by J. de Vries, and others, or were there obstacles that obstructed specialization? Third, what role did the medieval legacies play in the interaction between the ‘capitalist’ metropolis and the 'feudal' countryside?

Michael Limberger teaches at the Catholic University Brussels (KUB) and at Ghent University. His research covers late medieval and early modern economic and social history, especially of the Low Countries.

Coined money is a familiar part of day-to-day life, and has been for millennia in many societies. In the early Middle Ages, however, it worked rather differently. People across the former Roman Empire and beyond continued to think in terms of monetary units of account, but the supply and use of actual coin became highly uneven. Access to low-value coinage, small change, was particularly attenuated in western Europe, where gold and silver pieces predominated. This volume explores how people and societies dealt with changes to monetary systems. It looks at the experiences of different groups in society, from those who struggled with regimes that used only high value coins, to the elites who tended to benefit from those same conditions. The ten contributions to this volume consider diverse geographical areas from Byzantine Egypt to Italy, Francia, and Britain, identifying parallels and divergences among them. The chapters draw on cutting-edge archaeological and historical research to give a panorama of the latest thinking on early medieval money and coinage.

This volume advances our knowledge of continuing trends over the longue durée of European history. It also exposes many differences separating contemporaries from their medieval and early modern ancestors. In putting the concept of social capital to the test, the authors also expose the strengths, weaknesses, and limits of the ‘Putnam thesis’. The essays address fourteenth-century English fears of old-age neglect; childhood, friendship, scandal, and rivalry in Renaissance Florence; rebellion in an Italian village; social capital and signorial power in southern and north-central Italy; guild violence in Calvinist Ghent; civil society in early modern Bologna, Naples, and the Papal State; gender in High Renaissance Rome; and critical analyses of the transition from religious to secular sensibilities that scholars (following Jürgen Habermas) have identified in eighteenth-century Europe. In each case, the topic is considered in relation to recent theories of ‘social capital’: the informal, intangible bonds of trust upon which, social scientist Robert Putnam argues, every human community depends. The result is a series of highly original case-studies which reveal the workings of late medieval and early modern European society from new and often unexpected angles.

The goal of this book is to discuss the theoretical challenges posed by the study of social and political inequality of local societies in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages. Traditional approaches have defi ned rural communities as passive bodies, poor and unstable in the framework of a self-suffi cient economy. In the last few decades, social approaches both in medieval history and archaeology have neglected the opportunity to re-evaluate the role of peasantry and other subaltern groups, even where new written and material evidence has challenged traditional assumptions. Conversely, scholars focussing on elites and aristocracies have promoted powerful research agenda.

As a consequence of the 2007-2008 recession, the social sciences began to be interested in social and economic inequality, opening up new avenues for a reassessment of social history. The early medieval period has been identifi ed by numerous scholars as a key arena for the analysis of political complexity and social inequality in long-term perspective.

The study of local societies has become one of the most fruitful areas for innovative research in medieval archaeology and history, using approaches related to micro-history. This book, dedicated to Chris Wickham, is formed of fourteen papers centred on early medieval local communities drawing on both written and material records, which identify complex frameworks of social inequality at the lo

The organization of society formed a crucial element in the remarkable development of the countryside in the North Sea area in the last 1500 years. Vital questions are: who owned the land? Who gained the profits from its exploitation? How was the use of rural resources controlled and changed? These questions have no simple answers, because the land has been subjected to competing claims, varying from region to region. In early times peasants mostly possessed and worked their holdings, but lords took much of the produce, and had the ultimate control over the land. In more recent times the occupiers and cultivators gained stronger rights over their farms. Neither lords nor peasants were free agents because communities governed the use of common lands. In the highly urbanized North Sea region towns and townspeople had considerable and increasing influence over the countryside. Change came from within society, for example from the tension and negotiation between lords and peasants, and the growing importance of the state and its policies. This volume also looks at the interaction between society and external changes, such as the rise and fall of the market, trends in population, and European integration.

Bas J.P. van Bavel is professor of Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages at Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Richard W. Hoyle is professor of Rural History at the University of Reading, United Kingdom

La solitude en milieu urbain est un champ de recherche contemporain, porté en particulier par la sociologie. Les sociétés urbaines médiévales comptaient aussi leur lot de solitaires : enfants orphelins et abandonnés, immigrants à la recherche d’une vie meilleure, veufs et veuves, personnes âgées isolées. Le contexte de la deuxième moitié du XIV e siècle, avec ses épidémies de peste récurrentes et les ravages causés par la guerre de Cent Ans aggrave le phénomène. Étudiée dans le cadre de la ville de Montpellier, des années 1250 à la fin du XV e siècle, à partir d’archives consulaires, fiscales et testamentaires, la solitude se révèle comme un phénomène fréquent : nombreuses sont les personnes seules dans l’espace urbain. La solitude apparaît sous de multiples formes et se manifeste tout au long du cours de la vie des individus, entrecoupant les cycles de développement familiaux. Or, entre la vie en solitaire et l’isolement social existe toute une palette de situations personnelles, dont on ne peut saisir la complexité que par l’étude des solidarités, recherchées par les personnes seules ou spontanément offertes par des parents, des amis, qui viennent pallier la solitude.

This volume positions source scholarship as integral to an understanding of the transmission of knowledge across intellectual, social, and material networks in early medieval England. Essays in this collection situate source studies in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature within a range of theoretical and methodological approaches as varied as disability studies, feminist theory, history of science, and network analysis, tracing how ideas move across cultures and showing how studying sources enables us to represent the diversity of medieval voices embedded in any given text.

The essays in this volume extend the work of Charles D. Wright, who mentored a generation of scholars in methodologies of source study. The essays are organized into three sections. The first demonstrates how source studies facilitate tracing ideas across space and time. The second explores what happens to texts and ideas when they are transmitted from one culture, language, or historical moment to another. The third shows how sources illuminate wider cultural discourses. The volume attests to the flexibility of source work for early medieval English literature and argues for increased access to the tools that make such work possible.

John Freccero is internationally renowned for his scholarship on Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and other authors. Currently Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University, he has also taught at Yale, Stanford, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. His numerous honors include Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and awards from the city of Florence and the Republic of Italy.

Despite the diverse expertise of their authors (fairly evenly divided between Italianists and scholars of English and Comparative Literature), all of the articles included in the volume appertain to Italian literature - from a literary analysis of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium to tracing the State of Maryland’s medieval Italian motto back through its English Renaissance sources. Many of the pieces are concerned with Dante directly, and several others dealing with medieval and Renaissance Italian subjects do so indirectly. Two articles are concerned with pre-modern cultural and literary implications of the history of science; the remainder trace the afterlife of medieval or Renaissance Italian motifs in modern culture. Despite the fact that the articles range from medieval scholasticism to twentieth-century cinema, this volume addresses applications of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, influenced, above all, by the teaching and scholarship of John Freccero.

In the remotest corners of the Roman Empire, large crowds were as beguiled by spectacles as their Roman counterparts. Provincial spectacles however, did not share the technical wonders of flying machines, elephant dressage and synchronised swimming seen at imperial extravaganzas. Is it this lack of the sensational that accounts for the relative paucity of scholarly attention paid to regional spectacles and in particular, their sponsors?

When spectacles are viewed purely as entertainment, the messy realities of institutionalized social, economic and political power that regulated them are obscured. A clearer understanding of the spectacle can therefore be achieved by contextualizing it in the big picture of regional and provincial life against the backdrop of Roman power and control. The spectacle itself was highly political in its aims and intent. Access to sponsorship of a spectacle similarly relied on hierarchies of political power and privilege, and consequently required strategic negotiation of candidacy, promises, expenditure and recognition. Rivalry, competition and emulation was endemic.

This epigraphic analysis, focusing on the western Roman Empire (Italy, Gaul and North Africa) during the Imperial period, identifies the milieux of provincial sponsors, their strategies and quest for public honours.

The medieval sermon provides the focus for the first volume of Disputatio because it often expresses the concerns of various intellectual milieux, such as the university, Church or court, and attempts to convey those concerns to other parts of medieval society.

Speculum Sermonis is an anthology of essays about medieval sermons in the Christian East and West. It aims to reveal precisely how sermons inform different disciplines (for instance, social and Church history, literature, musicology) and how the methodologies of different disciplines inform sermons. Sermons can, for instance, provide evidence for a reconstruction of medieval liturgy; reciprocally, the field of liturgiology investigates sermons as one aspect of Church performance. The volume’s title image of the mirror and the reference to medieval specula convey the idea of multiple reflections: the sermons’ on culture and the disciplines’ on sermons. Because the contributors to Speculum Sermonis come from a variety of fields, the essays here collectively provide a rich historical and contemporary academic context for reading the medieval sermon.

In addition to essays from across the fields, a number of which establish conclusions transcending disciplinary boundaries, Speculum Sermonis includes an introduction defending interdisciplinary study of sermons and an authoritative bibliography covering both primary and secondary resources for medieval sermons. A unique feature of the volume is the inclusion of response papers to the essays in each of the sections, in the spirit of the book series title Disputatio.

Le volume s’interroge sur la place de Spinoza dans les milieux intellectuels, philosophiques et scientifiques de l’Angleterre et de l’Europe du xvii e siècle, et il analyse les contextes scientifiques privilégiés qui ont fourni à Spinoza plusieurs motifs de réflexion et qui ont compté ensuite parmi ses principaux lieux de réception. Le rapport entre Spinoza et le débat philosophique en Angleterre a retenu l’attention des historiens depuis longtemps. Il s’agit d’un terrain historiographique complexe où questions de sources, réception des idées et enjeux polémiques se mêlent souvent. La première partie du volume a une approche plus thématique : on se focalise sur un thème de la philosophie de Spinoza pour y voir, comme dans un prisme, le reflet des débats croisés entre Pays-Bas et Angleterre. La deuxième partie du volume est consacrée principalement à Spinoza et à la considération du rapport avec la physique hobbesienne. La troisième partie du volume porte sur les polémiques autour des œuvres de Spinoza qui furent lues durant le dix-huitième siècle en Angleterre et sur le continent, les spéculations philosophiques d’un cartésien athée et les œuvres d’un impie. Le parcours intellectuel du livre, qui rassemble les contributions de A. Di Nardo, R. Evangelista, G. Giglioni, E. Guillemeau, M. Laerke, F. Mignini, A. Sangiacomo, C. Santinelli, M. Sanna, C. Secretan, L. Simonutti, T. Verbeek, s’achève par la postface de Pierre-François Moreau.

L’hagiographie a souvent été décriée jusqu’au vingtième siècle. C’est ainsi que la plus vaste compilation hagiographique du Moyen Age occidental était restée dans l’oubli presque total. à travers quatre volumineux manuscrits en latin (Sanctilogium, Agyologus Brabantinorum, Novale Sanctorum et Hystoriologus Brabantinorum), Jean Gielemans (1427-1487), chanoine régulier de saint Augustin à Rouge-Cloître en Brabant, avait pourtant réalisé entre 1471 et 1487 une véritable encyclopédie hagiographique, et plus encore, laissé un trésor inestimable pour l’histoire religieuse, culturelle et politique.

Issu d’une thèse de doctorat, ce livre met en évidence un genre patriotique inédit où l’hagiographe exalte le Brabant à travers une histoire sacrée tout en reflétant deux idéaux de sainteté, masculine et féminine, entre mystique et Dévotion moderne.

Véronique Hazebrouck-Souche, docteur en histoire médiévale, a enseigné principalement à l’université de Paris X et participé à des projets de recherche en France, Belgique, Italie, Angleterre, Allemagne et aux Pays-Bas.

The linguistic situation of medieval Europe has sometimes been characterized as one of diglossia: one learned language, Latin, was used for religion, law, and documents, while the various vernaculars were used in other linguistic registers. Informing the relationship between Latin and the vernaculars was the choice of Latin as the language of the Western Roman Empire and the Roman Church. This choice entailed the possibility of a shared literary culture and heritage across Europe, but also had consequences for access to that heritage. Scholarship on the Romance languages has contested the relevance of the term diglossia, and the divergence between written or spoken Latin and Romance is a subject of energetic debate. In other linguistic areas, too, questions have been voiced. How can one characterize the interaction between Latin and the various vernaculars, and between the various vernaculars themselves? To what extent could speakers from separate linguistic worlds communicate? These questions are fundamental for anyone concerned with communication, the transmission of learning, literary history, and cultural interaction in the Middle Ages. This volume contains contributions by historians, cultural historians, and students of texts, language, and linguistics, addressing the subject from their various perspectives but at the same time trying to overcome familiar disciplinary divisions.

As abbot of Bec and archbishop of Canterbury, the renowned theologian St. Anselm spent most of his career working ‘in the world’, primarily with laypersons, not in the cloister. His correspondence contains surprisingly many letters to laywomen, only a few perfunctory letters to nuns and abbesses. Anselm wrote to all estates of noble laywomen: young girls, mothers, mature wives or widows, countesses and queens. Vaughn argues that Anselm collected and edited his own letters, which addressed real women and situations, but also represented particular ideals of women, marriage, parents and children, students and teachers; that the correspondence, an artful construct, was almost an autobiography, teaching by word, deed, and his own example; and a lens through which to discern Anselm’s views of men and women in Anselm’s ideal society. Anselm accords women surprising equality and power, seeing queens as equal to both kings and archbishops, all three primarily as nurturers and teachers, and ideal married couples writ large - social views modelled on past ideals (primarily St. Gregory), but ironically leaping toward new Twelfth Century attitudes of introspection, self-analysis, individualism, and logic and reason in theology, social issues, politics and law. Mothers and teachers emerge as the ultimate Handmaidens of God.

Die Beschäftigung mit der Memoria, dem mittelalterlichen Totengedenken, zieht sich leitmotivisch durch die Forschungstätigkeit von Thomas Schilp 19. Oktober 1953 – 28. September 2019). Angeregt durch die Arbeiten von Otto Gerhard Oexle zur mittelalterlichen Erinnerungskultur erschloss er mit seiner ihn auszeichnenden Sorgfalt im historischen Sehen und Denken sowie in der präzisen und gleichzeitig interdisziplinären Analyse der uellen immer weitere Dimensionen dieses alle sozialen Schichten und alle Bereiche des täglichen Lebens umfassenden Phänomens. Dabei war für ihn von zentraler Bedeutung – wie auch in diesem Band – die Art und Weise, wie die Konstituierung unterschiedlichster gesellschaftlicher Gruppen zur Gewährleistung des Totengedenkens erfolgte. Seine Forschungen verdeutlichen auf verschiedenen, sich durchdringenden Ebenen eine von heutigen Denkformen unterschiedene Auffassung gesellschaftlichen Lebens. Dabei rücken die neue Leseart von Bildern, die Interpretation von Tönen und Klängen (wie beispielsweise Schlag und Geläute von Glocken) als akustische Zeichen sowie ephemere Erscheinungen wie etwa die mittelalterlichen Lichtinszenierungen in Kirchen immer stärker in den Blickpunkt seiner Ausführungen. Thomas Schilps früher Tod ermöglichte es ihm nicht mehr, die begonnene umfassende Monographie zum Thema Stadt und Memoria fertig zu stellen. Dieser Band vereint eine Auswahl von Aufsätzen, welche die Dimensionen seiner intensiven Beschäftigung mit Formen mittelalterlichen Denkens und Handelns reflektieren.

By exploring communication and social practices employed during negotiations at the papal court, this volume sheds light on a wide range of sources for studying the high and late medieval papacy. Analyzing the terminology and practice of the ‘stilus curiae’ in documents from all parts of Europe, this volume puts forward a new understanding of negotiation and conflict resolution at the papal court in the Middle Ages. ‘Stilus curiae’ usually refers to the language and style of curial documents, and it is often used to describe the customary application of legal procedure in court practice. The authors of this volume, however, argue for a broader understanding of ‘stilus curiae’ as an umbrella term that encompasses all forms of communication and social practices used during negotiations at the papal court. This volume (the first of two) publishes the results of a research network funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Through analysis of the concept(s) of the ‘stilus curiae’, the chapters throw new light on a wide range of sources from the High and Late Middle Ages, including chronicles, biographic and polemic texts, as well as administrative sources, such as letters of petitioners and proctors, speeches, and financial records of ambassadors. Thus, the volume offers a new approach towards the papacy between 1100 and 1500.