Brepols

The Prague Sacramentary is a unique liturgical manuscript which can be very precisely located in a specific social and historical context. It was written in the turbulent period when Charlemagne crossed Bavaria to fight the Avars and when his son Pippin rebelled against him, seeking support among the Bavarian nobility. The manuscript can be linked to specific groups of Bavarian elites that had to come to terms with this explosive political situation. It also elucidates the ways in which Christian culture was expressed and experienced in Bavaria at the end of the eighth century. Although Bavaria may be regarded as a periphery from a Frankish perspective, it was certainly no cultural backwater. Because of its geographical position at the crossroads of Italian, Bavarian, and Frankish culture, Bavaria produced unique and intriguing texts and artefacts.

One such object is analysed here by a team of experts, shedding renewed light on the earthly and heavenly concerns of an early medieval community in a specific region. It includes a discussion of the topics of the formal invocation of saints, vernacular understandings of Latin texts, marriage, politics, and concerns for ritual purity as well as the well-being of the conflict-ridden Carolingian family.

Over more than a thousand years since pre-Christian religions were actively practised, European - and later contemporary - society has developed a fascination with the beliefs of northern Europe before the arrival of Christianity, which have been the subject of a huge range of popular and scholarly theories, interpretations, and uses. Indeed, the pre-Christian religions of the North have exerted a phenomenal influence on modern culture, appearing in everything from the names of days of the week to Hollywood blockbusters. Scholarly treatments have been hardly less varied. Theories - from the Middle Ages until today - have depicted these pre-Christian religious systems as dangerous illusions, the works of Satan, representatives of a lost proto-Indo-European religious culture, a form of ‘natural’ religion, and even as a system non-indigenous in origin, derived from cultures outside Europe.

The Research and Reception strand of the Pre-Christian Religions of the North project establishes a definitive survey of the current and historical uses and interpretations of pre-Christian mythology and religious culture, tracing the many ways in which people both within and outside Scandinavia have understood and been influenced by these religions, from the Christian Middle Ages to contemporary media of all kinds. The present volume (I) traces the reception down to the early nineteenth century, while Volume II takes up the story from c. 1830 down to the present day and the burgeoning of interest across a diversity of new as well as old media.

The modern period has read its own contingent values into Middle English literature, and a modern canon of vernacular medieval literary texts has evolved as a result. While this book works with a selection of texts that have achieved such canonical status, it brings to light some of the ways in which they nevertheless resist the flattening domestications and expectations of modern taste. It illustrates how they formerly existed as constituents of a past world richer, stranger, and less familiar than much modern opinion has supposed. Thus the book aims to recuperate lost senses in which the age in which these texts were conceived and written was present within them, as well as ways in which they may have been present to their age. This twin idea of ‘presence’ is the thread that binds a series of chapters on English verse and prose written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries together. While they may be read as discrete studies of individual literary land- marks, the chapters also entail an implicit and ramifying demonstration of the short- comings of some modern views of what makes certain currently prized Middle English texts worth reading, and of how the vernacular literature of medieval England is retrospectively to be defined and periodized.

The articles in this volume explore the teachings on happiness by a range of thinkers from antiquity through Spinoza, most of whom held human happiness to comprise intellectual knowledge of that which is Good in itself, namely God. These thinkers were from Greek pagan, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian backgrounds and wrote their works in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. Still, they shared similar philosophical views of what constitutes the Highest Good, and of the intellectual activities to be undertaken in pursuit of that Good. Yet, they differed, often greatly, in the role they assigned to deeds and practical activities in the pursuit of this happiness. These differences were, at times, not only along religious lines, but also along political and ethical lines. Other differences treated the relationship between the body and intellectual happiness and the various ways in which bodily health and well-being can contribute to intellectual health and true happiness.

This volume explores the reception of biblical figures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with a particular focus on Antiquity and incursions in the Middle Ages and modernity. The contributions included here offer a glimpse of the complexity of the mechanics of transmission to which these figures were subjected in extra-biblical texts, either concentrating on one author or corpus in particular, or broadening the scope across time and cultural contexts. The volume intends to shed light on how these biblical figures and their legacies appear as channels of collective memory and identity; how they became tools for authors to achieve specific goals; how they gained new and powerful authority for communities; and how they transcend traditions and cultural boundaries. As a result, the vitality and fluidity of the developments of traditions become clear and prompt caution when using modern categories.

Of all the new monastic and religious groups to settle in the British Isles in the course of the twelfth century the regular canons were the most prolific. At the heart of their existence was the vita apostolica, but even more than other such groups the regular canons became involved in active spiritual care of their communities. Perhaps as a result of this feature they also enjoyed sustained support from founders, patrons, and benefactors, and new foundations continued to be made long after the main force of the expansion of the monastic orders had declined. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England who work on aspects of the history, culture, art history, and archaeology of the regular canons in the medieval British Isles. Between them, the chapters of this book consider the regular canons in their wider historical and historiographical context, assessing their role in the religious, social, cultural, economic, and political world of the medieval British Isles, and introducing new and recent research on this important religious group.

Medieval Church Studies is a series of monographs and, sometimes, collections devoted to the history of the Western Church from, approximately, the Carolingian reform to the Council of Trent. It builds on Brepols’ longstanding interest in editions of texts and primary sources, and presents studies that are founded on a traditional close analysis of primary sources but which confront current research issues and adopt contemporary methodological approaches.

Adriaan Verhulst's The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (1999) is the last comprehensive work written by a single author on the urban genesis and spatial developments of cities in the medieval Low Countries. Since then, monographs, specialised studies and articles have been published on various cities and towns, while urban archaeologists have carried out numerous excavations. Much new knowledge has been gained, yet many gaps and the need for comparative overviews remain.Twenty-five years after Verhulst’s synthesis, The Rise of Cities Revisited takes a fresh look at the origins and developments of cities and towns in the Low Countries between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries, critically assesses progress made in scholarship and outlines future directions for research. The chapters of the book are written by senior and junior specialists from various fields, including medieval history, historical geography, economic history, archaeology and building history. The Rise of Cities Revisited presents a state of the art and provides scholars with tools to study this complex subject in future.

Medieval communication followed rules that were defined, negotiated, and altered in processes of exchange. Conflicts resulting from different communication practices, as well as forms of innovation, revolve around rules that are not self-evident. Political actors such as princes and cities, chanceries, secretaries, ambassadors, and councillors formed rules of political participation, which became visible in written documentation. These rules were both formed and negotiated via processes of communication. Medieval chanceries can thus be understood as a vast field of experimentation where different solutions were tested, passed on, or discarded.

This book explores communication practices in German, French, Italian, Tyrolian, and Gorizian chanceries, as well as at diets from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Its chapters examine royal, monastic, princely, and communal chanceries. For the early and high Middle Ages, a close analysis of documents will reconstruct negotiation and communication from within the documents themselves. For the later Middle Ages, focus will turn to the chancery, with the appearance of chancery orders and chancery annotations that provide explicit insight in communication between the chancellors, secretaries, and political authorities. The growing amount and variety of documents issued in the late Middle Ages allows us to retrace conflicts resulting from differing chancery practices as well as attempts to reorganise the chancery into a political instrument for the prince. The processes of political communication will be followed in three parts. Part I focuses on the rules within documents. Part II looks at administrative processes within specific chanceries, while Part III explores forms of exchange between the chancery and other political actors.

This groundbreaking study takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial progress to a wider audience, and in so doing increase its cultural and economic reach.Placing materiality at its core, this volume provides an intellectual history of Victorian ideas about technology, progress, and prosperity. The narrative is underpinned by a wealth of new sources – from architectural models and archival materials to 19th century newspapers. Each chapter focuses on a particular element of the Royal Albert Hall’s construction, chronicling the previously overlooked work of a host of contributors from all walks of life, including female mosaic-makers and the Royal Engineers.Lighting, ventilation, fireproofing, ‘ascending rooms’, cements, acoustics, the organ, the record-breaking iron dome, and the organisation of internal spaces were all attempts to attain progress - and subject to intense public scrutiny. From iron structures to terracotta, from the education of women to the abolition of slavery, in the making of the Royal Albert Hall scientific knowledge and socio-cultural reform were intertwined.This book shows, for the first time, how the Royal Albert Hall’s building was itself a crucible for innovation. Illustrious techniques from antiquity were reimagined for the new mechanical age, placing the building at the heart of a process of collecting, describing, and systematising arts and practices. At the same time, the Royal Albert Hall was conceived as a ‘manifesto’ of what the Victorians thought Britain ought to be, at a crucial moment of its socio-economic history: a symbolic cultural hub for the Empire’s metropole.This is the Royal Albert Hall: a central piece of the puzzle in Britain’s march towards modernity.

The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of profound change, the threshold between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’, as new technologies were introduced, distant lands explored, oceanic trade routes opened, and innovative ideas pursued in fields as varied as politics, science, philosophy, law, and religion. But sweeping transformations also occurred in the rural world, profoundly altering the countryside in both appearance and practices. Crucially for historians, there is abundant documentary evidence for these changes but, while they are less well-documented, their impact can also be traced archaeologically.

This cutting-edge volume is the first to explore the archaeology of the rural world across the ‘long’ sixteenth century and to investigate the changing innovations that were seen in landscape, technology, agriculture, and husbandry during this period. Drawing together contributions from across Europe, and from a range of archaeological disciplines, including zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, landscape archaeology, material culture studies, and technology, this collection of essays sheds new light on a key period of innovation that was a significant precursor to modern economies and societies.

The ancient city of Neapolis (modern Kavala, Greece) was founded by Thasos in the seventh century BCE at a strategic location where the Thracian hinterlands meet the Aegean Sea. The patron deity of this North Aegean polis was Parthenos (the Maiden), a goddess often associated with Artemis and known to us through epigraphic and archaeological evidence. Her sanctuary came to light in the twentieth century, during rescue excavations, and yielded numerous finds, most of which date from the Archaic period.

This edited volume draws together the material evidence from the Sanctuary of Parthenos, with a particular focus on the ceramic wares, stone inscriptions, and small finds from the site. Published as a counterpart to an earlier publication in this series, Amalia Avramidou’s monograph, The Sanctuary of Parthenos at Ancient Neapolis (Kavala): Incised and Painted Ceramic Inscriptions from the Sanctuary and in Aegean Thrace, the essays gathered here nonetheless form a stand-alone volume that sheds light on both the importance of the site as a place of cult, and more broadly the role that it played within the commercial networks and cultural dynamics of the Aegean.

A seminal article published by Giles Constable in 1953 focused on the genesis and expansion in scope of the Second Crusade with particular attention to what has become known as the Syrian campaign. His central thesis maintained that by the spring of 1147 the Church “viewed and planned” the Second Crusade as a general Christian offensive against and the Muslims of Syria and the Iberian Peninsula and the pagan Wends of the southern Baltic lands. Constable's work remains extremely influential and provides the framework for the recent major works published on this extraordinary twelfth-century phenomenon. This volume aims to readdress scholarly predilections for concentrating on the venture in the Near East and for narrowly focusing on the accepted targets of the crusade. It aims instead to place established, contentious, and new events and concepts associated with the enterprise in a wider ideological, chronological, geopolitical, and geographical context.

Jason T. Roche is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests cover the history of the crusades and the Latin East and the topography of medieval Anatolia and the Near East.

Janus Møller Jensen is head of department at Nyborg Castle, Museums of Eastern Funen, Denmark. His main research interests cover the history and historiography of the Crusades and Scandinavian medieval history.

For many years, the Septuagint of Ruth (LXX-Ruth) has been considered a literal translation. Several authors have emphasized the similarities between the Greek text and the Masoretic Text, while others have also noted the divergences. In the wake of this second stream, this book seeks to answer the crucial question: How can we nuance the definition of “literalism” for LXX-Ruth, and which innovations and specifics can be detected in this text? A fresh analysis of the Greek rendering of the Hebrew proper names, toponyms, hapax legomena as well as legal aspects makes it possible to develop new perspectives on the translation technique of LXX-Ruth and to highlight several characteristics of this text. This volume, moreover, extends the discussion by including the analysis of the theological accents of LXX-Ruth and an up-to-date presentation of its textual history including the fragments of the book in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Overall, this volume enhances our understanding of the linguistic and literary background of the LXX, as well as its specific features.

The French Dominican William Peraldus or Guillaume Peyraut (died c. 1275), well known for his long summae on the vices and virtues, also produced several cycles of sermons, of which two deal with the Epistle and the Gospel readings for the Sundays of the Church year. This study analyzes the latter in some detail and argues that, rather than collecting sermons he had preached earlier, Peraldus wrote these sermons systematically for the use of other preachers. The Epistle sermons for the first Sunday in Advent and the Gospel sermons for the third Sunday in Advent are presented in their original Latin text together with an English translation in order to demonstrate how Peraldus dealt with the biblical text as well as his moral concerns and his literary style. The selected texts are then compared with several other major cycles produced in France in Peraldus’s time. Like his summae on the vices and the virtues, Peraldus’s sermons became very popular in medieval Europe, as is witnessed by selective copying and citations that can be seen in a number of instances primarily from the sermon literature of later medieval England. One aspect of this popularity is the adaptation of his material into a genuine sermon, as it can be found in the sermons attributed to Repingdon, of which one is here examined in detail.

Elves and dwarves, trolls and giants, talking dragons, valkyries and werewolves: all these are familiar in modern movies and commercial fantasy. But where did the concepts come from? Who invented them? Almost two centuries ago, Jacob Grimm assembled what was known about such creatures in his work on 'Teutonic Mythology', which brought together ancient texts such as Beowulf and the Elder Edda with the material found in Grimm's own famous collection of fairy-tales. This collection of essays now updates Grimm, adding much material not known in his time, and also challenges his monolithic interpretations, pointing out the diversity of cultural traditions as well as the continuity of ancient myth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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