Brepols

Gesù era Cinico? I suoi discepoli? E Paolo? Queste domande, che rientrano nel più generale tema della possibile influenza del Cinismo sul Cristianesimo delle origini, costituiscono un importante capitolo storiografico, nato in Germania nel primo Novecento e ampiamente sviluppatosi più tardi soprattutto negli Stati Uniti d’America.

A questi problemi è dedicato il presente volume, che, partendo da un’analisi sempre attenta alle evidenze testuali, intende vagliare, da una prospettiva storico-filosofica, la possibilità che Gesù e il Cristianesimo delle origini siano stati influenzati dal Cinismo, e da tale tradizione filosofica abbiano ricevuto sollecitazioni o stimoli. Lo studio è rivolto a testi quali i Vangeli Sinottici e le Lettere Paoline (nello specifico, la Prima Lettera ai Corinzi), in cui i fautori della Cynic Jesus Hypothesis hanno ritenuto di poter rinvenire elementi definibili come ‘cinici’.

Tale analisi si presta in maniera singolare a gettare luce non solo su autori importanti e temi della tradizione cinica particolarmente discussi, ma anche sui rapporti tra la tradizione ellenica e le origini del Cristianesimo.

Tema, quest’ultimo, di interesse non solamente storico-filosofico e teologico ma anche schiettamente teoretico, perché tocca la questione, viva e dibattuta ancora oggi, seppure talvolta sotto forme diverse, delle relazioni tra la riflessione filosofica e il credo religioso, tra fides e ratio.

En 2003, le Centre d’Études supérieures de Civilisation médiévale de Poitiers a célébré ses cinquante années d’existence par la tenue d’une série de manifestations scientifiques et culturelles dont un grand colloque international au titre évocateur, retenu pour la présente publication: Cinquante années d’études médiévales. À la confluence de nos disciplines.

Les Actes de ce colloque, qui a reflété la place prééminente du CESCM au sein des études médiévales internationales ainsi que la diversité et la richesse du travail interdisciplinaire produit par les équipes de recherche et les services documentaires du Centre, constituent donc un ouvrage de référence non seulement pour les domaines abordés mais aussi pour la médiévistique en général.

This book honours the scholarship of English historian Dr. Alan Thacker by exploring the insular, the European and, more broadly, the Mediterranean connections and contexts of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the age of Bede, and beyond. It brings together original contributions by leading European and North American scholars of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages working across a range of disciplines: history, theology, epigraphy, and art history. Moving from the Irish Sea to the Bosporus, this collection presents a linked world in which saints, scholars, and the city of Rome all played powerful connective roles, creating communities, generating relationships, linking east to west, north to south, and present to past.

As in Thacker’s own work, Bede’s life and thought is a central presence. Bede’s attitudes to historical and contemporaneous conceptions of heresy, to the Irish church, and the evidence for his often complex relationships with his Northumbrian contemporaries all come under scrutiny, together with groundbreaking studies of his exegesis, christology, and historical method. Many of the contributions offer original insights into figures and phenomena that have been the focus of Dr. Thacker’s highly influential scholarship.

During the Ancient Greek and Roman eras, participation in political communities at the local level, and assertion of belonging to these communities, were among the fundamental principles and values on which societies would rely. For that reason, citizenship and democracy are generally considered as concepts typical of the political experience of Classical Antiquity. These concepts of citizenship and democracy are often seen as inconsistent with the political, social, and ideological context of the late and post-Roman world. As a result, scholarship has largely overlooked participation in local political communities when it comes to the period between the disintegration of the Classical model of local citizenship in the later Roman Empire and the emergence of ‘pre-communal’ entities in Northern Italy from the ninth century onwards.

By reassessing the period c. 300-1000 ce through the concepts of civic identity and civic participation, this volume will address both the impact of Classical heritage with regard to civic identities in the political experiences of the late and post-Roman world, and the rephrasing of new forms of social and political partnership according to ethnic or religious criteria in the early Middle Ages. Starting from the earlier imperial background, the fourteen chapters examine the ways in which people shared identity and gave shape to their communal life, as well as the role played by the people in local government in the later Roman Empire, the Germanic kingdoms, Byzantium, the early Islamic world, and the early medieval West. By focusing on the post-Classical, late antique, and early medieval periods, this volume intends to be an innovative contribution to the general history of citizenship and democracy.

Les notions d’urbanité, de politesse et de savoir-vivre connaissent depuis une dizaine d’années un intérêt renouvelé à la fois dans leurs dimensions politique, sociale et culturelle.

Cet ouvrage souhaite envisager le milieu urbain en tant qu’espace de civilité en croisant les regards des historiens et des spécialistes de la littérature de l’âge classique. Il s’agit aussi d’examiner les cérémonies et rituels du XVIIe siècle comme un ensemble de réseaux de pratiques codifiées, dans lequel interagissent notamment des usages collectifs et des préséances individuelles. Ces usages organisent l’espace urbain comme l’espace curial en se déployant en leur sein. La confrontation des archives et des documents littéraires, mais aussi des outils et des méthodologies utilisés par ces différents champs disciplinaires, permet d’étudier à nouveaux frais les relations entre des concepts trop rapidement perçus comme antonymiques : l’incivilité n’est jamais le contraire de la civilité, et il n’existe pas de civilisation, ni de société civilisée, qui puisse se revendiquer comme statique ou achevée. En revenant, dans le sillage des travaux de Norbert Elias, aux origines de la civilité moderne, envisagée à l’échelle européenne, cet ouvrage entreprend d’examiner ce processus, non pas de manière linéaire et téléologique, mais dans la complexité de ses évolutions et mutations, afin de mieux contextualiser les débats contemporains autour de l’incivilité.

The Festschrift volume Classica et Beneventana, presented to Virginia Brown on the occasion of her 65th birthday, brings together eighteen insightful new essays by leading scholars devoted to the fields of classical reception and Latin palaeography. The authors investigate a wide-range of topics such as the development and application of the Beneventan script, comparative codicology, use of early liturgical manuscripts, medieval artes and biblical texts and their readers, and the reception and dissemination of classical texts during the Italian Renaissance.

Since 1970, Virginia Brown has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. She is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities in classical reception and Latin palaeography. Her numerous publications on the Beneventan script have dramatically altered our knowledge of the dissemination of this southern Italian book hand from 800 to 1600. Her editorial work for the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, as a member of the Editorial Board and since 1986 as Editor-in-Chief, has resulted in several learned volumes tracing the fortuna and study of classical authors from antiquity to the year 1600. As editor of Mediaeval Studies from 1975 to 1988, she single-handedly produced tomes noted for their scholarly rigor and acumen. This collection of essays serves as fitting tribute to a scholar who, via her scholarly research and editorial work, has done so much to advance the fields of palaeography, codicology, and the history of classical scholarship.

Thirty years in the making, Coins of the Ptolemaic Empire, Part II, by Catharine C. Lorber, is the long-anticipated second half of the Coins of the Ptolemaic Empire (CPE) project, featuring the coins struck by Ptolemy V–Cleopatra VII. As with Part 1, Lorber essentially rewrites the sections on these rulers in J. N. Svoronos’ classic, but now much out-of-date, Ta Nomismata tou Kratous ton Ptolemaion (1904). The body of coinage catalogued by Svoronos is enlarged by hundreds of additional emissions in precious metal and bronze, recorded from subsequent scholarship, from hoards, from commercial sources, and from private collections. Lorber’s attributions, dates, and interpretations rest on numismatic research conducted after Svoronos, or on the latest archaeological and hoard information. She also provides extensive historical and numismatic introductions that give the coins deeper context and meaning.

Dès l’Antiquité et tout au long du Moyen Âge, la Bible a été l’un des textes les plus reproduits dans le monde chrétien. Texte sacré par excellence, elle a été très largement commentée, remaniée, utilisée dans des contextes variés et avec des finalités diverses. C’est pourquoi, en tout lieu et à toute époque, elle constitua l’une des expressions les plus achevées, et parfois novatrices, du professionnalisme artisanal dans le domaine du livre médiéval. Si le texte de la Bible et sa tradition manuscrite ont depuis longtemps été l’objet d’une attention soutenue de la part des philologues, des exégètes et des historiens, il en va tout autrement pour ce qui est de son « incarnation » dans un objet matériel.

C’est aux diverses modalités de cette « incarnation » qu’était consacré le colloque international organisé à l’Université de Namur en mai 2012, dont les contributions sont ici réunies. Cette rencontre fut à la fois l’occasion de faire le point sur les connaissances déjà acquises sur la fabrication de la Bible de l’Antiquité tardive au xv e siècle, et d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherche. La perspective adoptée se veut globale et comparative, et met en lumière la diversité des solutions retenues pour répondre aux problèmes posés par la réalisation matérielle du texte sacré selon les époques et les contrées, des premières bibles pandectes à la diffusion des bibles incunables.

Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) was the Abbot of Vercelli in the north of Italy. Initially a canon regular in the abbey of St Victor in Paris, he helped found a new monastery and church in the home town of his patron, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri. As well as commenting on the Canticle of Canticles three times, Thomas was renowned for his expositions of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, commentaries which earned him the title magister in hierarchia (master of the hierarchies). This volume contains the first translation in any language of his Glosses on the Angelic (or Celestial) Hierarchy (completed in 1224), as well as his more detailed Explanation of the Angelic Hierarchy (finished in 1243). The commentaries are fascinating for their insights into Thomas’s teaching that love has a higher access to an experience of God than the intellect, the role of the angelic hierarchies in the mystical return of the soul, the psychological interpretation of the angels as representing faculties of the soul, and the use of symbols representing analogical features of the divine.

The source text of this volume appeared in Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis as Thomas Gallus, Super angelica ierarchia (CCCM, 223) and Glose super angelica ierarchia (CCCM, 223A). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.

Andrew of Saint Victor was one of the most prominent biblical scholars of the twelfth century. He was a regular canon of the Parisian abbey of St Victor, founded in 1108, which in the twelfth century had developed into a prestigious center of spiritual learning, closely connected to the nascent university in Paris. Because of his frequent use of Jewish exegetical materials, Andrew's commentaries are a rich source for the history both of biblical hermeneutics and of inter-religious dialogue during the Middle Ages. His Isaiah commentary caused outrage among medieval Christian scholars because it eschewed traditional christological interpretations, and instead offered a reading “according to the Hebrew.” This translation makes this work accessible in English for the first time.

The source text of this volume was published in 2021 by Frans van Liere (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis, 53C). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.

Girolamo completa il Commentario al profeta Abacuc nel 393 e lo dedica all'amico Cromazio, vescovo di Aquileia. Nel percorso esegetico che lo vede impegnato a spiegare l'intero corpus profetico, l'interpretazione di Abacuc dipende fortemente da Origene, sulla cui eredità sorgerà proprio in quell'anno la famosa controversia. Girolamo offre un doppio commento, al testo ebraico e a quello greco dei Settanta. Al primo dedica una spiegazione per lo più letterale, mentre al secondo è riservata l'esegesi di stampo allegorico. Un punto qualificante del commento di Girolamo è la coerenza interpretativa, che riesce a stabilire anche fra l’esegesi dei primi due capitoli e il terzo, il cosiddetto cantico di Abacuc, che ha la forma di un salmo. I suoi predecessori, notando una certa estraneità fra la vicenda storica dell’oppressione di Nabucodonosor (cap. 1-2) e il cantico, avevano dato di quest’ultimo testo una lettura cristologica indipendente dall’interpretazione della prima parte. Girolamo, invece, riesce a congiungere nella sua esegesi anche quest’ultima parte (che verosimilmente risulta aggiunta da un redattore al testo profetico), anticipando e applicando il senso cristologico anche ai primi due capitoli grazie a inserti in cui annuncia proletticamente la venuta di Cristo.

La versione latina originale del testo proposto in traduzione in questo volume è pubblicata nella collana Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina con il titolo Hieronymus - Commentarius in Abacuc (CCSL 76-76A bis 1). I rimandi alle pagine corrispondenti dell’edizione sono forniti a margine di questa traduzione.

Comment les hommes et les femmes du premier Moyen Âge formaient-ils des communautés lorsqu’ils se trouvaient vivre près de l’eau - sur les littoraux, dans les zones humides ou le long des fleuves, mais aussi dans les îles ? La familiarité entretenue avec le milieu aquatique, objet de crainte ou source d’opportunités, signifie que les groupes humains « faisaient communauté » autrement, mais aussi que l’historien appréhende ces phénomènes d’une manière différente. Cela est vrai de toutes les communautés qui, dans la pratique des interactions quotidiennes, se formaient près de l’eau, grâce à elle ou face à elle : communautés d’habitants, communautés cléricales ou monastiques, communautés fondées sur une activité commune comme le commerce ou la pêche. Les douze contributions que compte ce livre constituent les actes d’un colloque tenu à Boulogne-sur-Mer en mars 2017. Leurs auteurs s’attachent à croiser les sources écrites et archéologiques pour offrir un regard équilibré sur des espaces et une période qui semblent à première vue moins bien documentés que d’autres. La question de la construction et de l’existence des communautés « du bord de l’eau » y est traitée à travers toute l’Europe latine, du vii e au xi e siècle, sur ses versants adriatique (à travers les lagunes de Venise et de Comacchio), atlantique (du littoral ibérique à l’Angleterre en passant par l’île de Noirmoutier) et septentrional (des Fens d’Est-Anglie à la mer Baltique et dans les emporia des mers du Nord), ainsi que dans la vallée de la Saône (de Lyon à Tournus).

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities? This volume explores communities’ relationship with the natural environment in customs and laws, ideas, practices and memories. Taking a transregional perspective, it considers how the availability of natural resources in diverse societies within and outside Europe impacted mobility and gender structures, the consolidation of territorial power and property rights. Communities, Environment and Regulation in the Premodern World marks Peter Hoppenbrouwers’s career, spanning over three decades, as a professor of medieval history at Leiden University.

The scientific knowledge that Irish, English, and continental European scholars nurtured and developed during the years c. AD 500 to c. AD 1200 was assimilated, in the first place, from the wider Roman world of Late Antiquity. Time-reckoning, calendars, and the minute reckonings required to compute the date of Easter, all involved the minutiae of mathematics (incl. the original concept of ‘digital calculation’) and astronomical observation in a truly scientific fashion. In fact, the ‘Dark Ages’ were anything but dark in the fields of mathematics and astronomy.

The first Science of Computus conference in Galway in 2006 highlighted the transmission of Late Antique Mathematical Knowledge in Ireland & Europe, the development of astronomy in Early Medieval Ireland & Europe and the role of the Irish in the development of computistical mathematics. The proceedings of that conference should, therefore, appeal equally to those interested in the history of science in Ireland and Europe, and in the origins of present-day mathematical and astronomical ideas.

Ancient works On Kingship have received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, where the main focus is usually on classic works such as Seneca’s On Clemency, Isocrates’ Cyprian Orations or Dio of Prusa’s Kingship Orations. In this volume, we deliberately turn to the periphery, to the grey zone where matters usually prove more complicated. This volume focuses on authors who deal with analogous problems and raise similar questions in other contexts, authors who also address powerful rulers or develop ideals of right rulership but who choose very different literary genres to do so, or works on kingship that have almost been forgotten. Departing from well-trodden paths, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate by bringing in new relevant material and confront it with well-known and oft-discussed classics. This confrontation even throws a new light upon the very notion of ‘mirrors for princes’. Moreover, the selection of peripheral texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance reveals several patterns in the evolution of the tradition over a longer period of time.

Throughout the period 800–1250, English culture was marked by linguistic contestation and pluralism: the consequence of migrations and conquests and of the establishment and flourishing of the Christian religion centred on Rome. In 855 the Danes ‘over-wintered’ for the first time, re-initiating centuries of linguistic pluralism; by 1250 English had, overwhelmingly, become the first language of England. Norse and French, the Celtic languages of the borderlands, and Latin competed with dialects of English for cultural precedence. Moreover, the diverse relations of each of these languages to the written word complicated textual practices of government, poetics, the recording of history, and liturgy. Geographical or societal micro-languages interacted daily with the ‘official’ languages of the Church, the State, and the Court. English and English speakers also played key roles in the linguistic history of medieval Europe. At the start of the period of inquiry, Alcuin led the reform of Latin in the Carolingian Empire, while in the period after the Conquest, the long-established use of English as a written language encouraged the flourishing of French as a written language. This interdisciplinary volume brings the complex and dynamic multilingualism of medieval England into focus and opens up new areas for collaborative research.

The literature against the Jews (contra Iudeos) was crucially influential in the shaping of Christianity during the centuries following the crucifixion, particularly during the period when Christianity remained outside official Roman toleration. And yet, this phenomenon did not decline in the Middle Ages when Christianity emerged as the supreme power in the western world and Judaism could no longer threaten it in any way. The Jewish response to this literary practice did not arise for some time, yet from the twelfth century onwards the effort to counter Christian ideological attacks became a central intellectual activity and a pressing concern on the part of Jewish scholars in the West. Although both Latin and Hebrew polemics were often intended, first and foremost, for local audiences in order to satisfy local needs and intellectual demands, they also engaged each other, and raised urgent theological and cultural questions in doing so. This cultural discourse did not just find expression in polemical literature (Nizahon and Adversus Iudaeos) but also in a variety of other representations and daily practices. This collection of studies is devoted to an examination of the significance of this phenomenon as a longue durée process, and pursues its concerns from a variety of innovative perspectives that join together authoritative scholars from the field of Jewish-Christian relations.

By the late Middle Ages, mendicant spiritual confraternities had developed a poor reputation. Their spiritual status was ill-identified: somewhere between requests for intercession, necrological commemoration, and pious associations. In the hands of the mendicants, they seemed to resemble what indulgences had supposedly become in the hands of the papacy: bait that was handed out to extort funds from the faithful while offering an apparently immediate access to Paradise. Thus, like indulgences, they seem to have been gradually emptied of their substance and denounced (even before Luther) as glaring evidence of the corruption of the Roman Church. Much recent scholarship has followed this negative portrait of spiritual confraternities — unless it has conflated them with other non-spiritual confraternities, or indeed ignored them altogether.

This volume draws on the abundant number of letters of confraternity available from Hungarian sources in order to provide a more nuanced picture of mendicant spiritual confraternities. It sheds new light on the links between the mendicants and their supports among the laity, and emphasises the broader significance of the confraternity movement in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.

Over the past several decades, scholars of medieval and early modern Iberia have transformed the study of the region into one of the most vibrant areas of research today. This volume brings together twelve essays from a diverse group of international historians who explore the formation of the multiple and overlapping identities, both individual and collective, that made up the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh through seventeenth centuries. Individually, the contributions in this volume engage with the notion of identity in varied ways, including the formation of collective identities at the level of the late medieval city, the use of writing and political discourse to construct or promote common political or socio-cultural identities, the role of encounters with states and cultures beyond the peninsula in identity formation, and the ongoing debates surrounding the peninsula’s characteristic ethno-religious pluralism.Collectively, these essays challenge the traditional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, providing a broader framework for approaching Iberia’s fragmented yet interconnected internal dynamics while simultaneously reflecting on the implications of Iberia’s positioning within the broader Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.

This book explores representations of saints in a variety of Latin and Greek late antique hagiographical narratives, such as saints’ Lives, martyr acts, miracle collections, and edifying tales. The book examines techniques through which the saints featured in such texts are depicted as heroes and heroines, i.e., as extraordinary characters exhibiting both exemplary behaviour and a set of specific qualities that distinguish them from others. The book inscribes itself in a growing body of relatively recent scholarship that approaches hagiographical accounts not just as historical sources but also as narrative constructions. As such, it contributes to the development of a scholarly rationale which increasingly values imaginative and fictional aspects of hagiography in their own right, with the aim of answering broader questions about narrative creativity and ideology. For instance, individual chapters examine how hagiographical accounts mobilize and capitalize on earlier literary and rhetorical traditions or narrative models. These questions are specifically addressed to explore the narrative construction of characters. The chapters thereby encourage us to acknowledge that many hagiographers were more skilful than is often accepted.

In considering the construction of medieval sermons, the term ‘construction’ has many meanings. Those studied here range from questions about sermon composition with the help of artes praedicandi or model collections to a more abstract investigation of the mental construction of the concepts of sermon and preacher. Sermons from a range of European countries, written both in Latin and vernaculars, are subjected to a broad variety of analyses. The approach demonstrates the vitality of this sub-discipline. Most of the essays are more occupied with literary and philological problems than with the religious content of the sermons. While many focus on vernacular sermons, the Latin cultural and literary background is always considered and shows how vernacular preaching was in part based on a more learned Latin culture. The collection testifies both to the increasing esteem of the study of vernacular sermons, and to a revival in the study of all those things contained in a preacher’s ‘workshop’, ranging from rhetorical invention, medieval library holdings and study-aids, through to factors that are crucial for the successful delivery of the sermon, such as the choice of language, mnemonic devices and addressing the audience. The interdisciplinary approach remains ever-present, not only in the diversity of the academic disciplines represented, but also within individual essays. The volume is based on a conference held in Stockholm, 7-9 October 2004.

Entre la fin du IXe et le milieu du Xe siècle, de nouvelles formes de pouvoir émergent en Occident, au sein d’un monde encore carolingien : un bouleversement majeur qui marque la genèse de la société seigneuriale. C’est cette période charnière que permet d’appréhender la figure d’Odon, deuxième abbé de Cluny, grand aristocrate, réformateur acharné et intellectuel de haut niveau.

L’itinéraire d’Odon (né vers 879, mort en 942), acteur de premier plan et témoin privilégié de son temps, reflète en effet la profonde transformation des structures aristocratiques alors à l’œuvre, tandis que l’ecclésiologie originale élaborée par l’abbé réformateur, avec un bagage qui demeure celui du lettré carolingien, définit les conditions et les contours d’une société d’un type nouveau. L’objet de cet ouvrage est bien de cerner au plus près la recomposition des rapports de force et les ressorts idéologiques d’un monde où le champ des possibles est largement ouvert. À quelles stratégies, à la fois sociales et discursives, un puissant aristocrate entré au service de Dieu a-t-il recours pour fonder et asseoir son pouvoir ? À un moment où évoluent les cadres de la société et où se bâtissent de nouvelles légitimités, de quelle manière un réformateur justifie-t-il la domination des moines sur l’ensemble du corps social ? Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’analyser comment un abbé du Xe siècle construit, tant sur le plan des pratiques sociales que des représentations, une certaine société seigneuriale.

Isabelle Rosé, agrégée et docteur en histoire, a réalisé ce travail dans le cadre du Centre d’études Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge, unité mixte de recherche de l’université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis et du CNRS. Elle est à présent maître de conférences à l’université de Haute-Bretagne - Rennes 2.

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.

This volume explores the Viking Age colonization and exploration of the North Atlantic, from Arctic Norway to Vinland in eastern North America. Its contributors, predominately archaeologists by training, bring new evidence and an interdisciplinary perspective to a subject often dominated by sources of variable historicity. They explore the creation and transformation of ethnicity in new lands - some occupied, others empty. They also address the historiography of Norse Landnám, unravelling the processes by which scholarly interpretations of the Viking Age have been created. The result illuminates the consequences of migration in the early Middle Ages and the interplay of local and large-scale socio-economic processes. In concluding, the volume assesses the relationship between Norse expansion and later European ‘rediscovery’ of the New World.

This bookaddresses the issue of political celebration in early modern Venice. Dealing with processional orders and iconographic programs, historiographical narratives and urbanistic canons, stylistic features and diplomatic accounts, the interdisciplinary contributions gathered in these pages aim to question the performative effectiveness and the social consistency of the so called ‘myth’ of Venice: a system of symbols, beliefs and meanings offering a self-portrait of the ruling elite, the Venetian patriciate. In order to do so, the volume calls for a spatial turn in Venetian studies, blurring the boundaries between institutionalized and unofficial ceremonial spaces and considering their ongoing interaction in representing the rule of the Serenissima. The twelve chapters move from Ducal Palace to the Venetian streets and from the city of Venice to its dominions, thus widening considerably the range of social and political actors and audiences involved in the analysis. Such multifocal perspective allows us to challenge the very idea of a single ‘myth’ of Venice.

Que peut faire un clerc de l'administration royale, à la fin du XIIe siècle, s'il est doté d'un humour féroce, d'une langue agile, d'une culture vaste et éclectique, d'un goût irrépressible pour les bonnes histoires colorées et corsées, face à la montée en force des nouvelles modes littéraires de la littérature en français et des romans courtois? Il prend une plume et rédige de "bonnes histoires pour les gens de cour", pour montrer qu'on peut s'amuser en latin, de façon moins ridicule à ses yeux que ceux qui pâlissent d'amour aux pieds des dames. Gautier Map, clerc anglais richement prébendé, grand conteur et amuseur des milieux de la cour de Henri II Plantagenêt, est à la fois attiré et agacé par les thèmes fantastiques, merveilleux et amoureux qui font les délices de la cour anglaise lorsque la reine Aliénor y séjourne. Il veut faire encore mieux: plus varié, plus subtil, plus savant, plus drôle et moins naïf. S'il méprise l'amour courtois, ce n'est pas par pudibonderie; s'il écrit dans la langue savante de son temps, ce n'est pas par timidité. Son oeuvre, que par nonchalance sans doute il garda dans ses papiers personnels, est fantaisiste, insolente, ironique; c'est pour les ethnologues un réservoir de renseignements sur des coutumes et des traditions que personne avant lui n'avait notées, pour les historiens de la littérature un témoignage d'une époque où rien n'était encore joué entre la langue vulgaire et le latin (qui pouvaient encore se donner la réplique), pour tous un moment privilégié de l'émergence dans la littérature européenne d'un art du récit qui aboutit de temps en temps, dans ce recueil jamais ennuyeux ni banal, à d'éblouissantes réussites.

The essays in this book tap the potential of the historical analysis of social contexts in which property rights are embedded - social relations, power and agency, political institutions, culture - to understand how landed resources are actually appropriated. This exploratory approach seeks both to take advantage of the existing theory of property rights, as it is applied by the institutionalist outlook on economic history, and to go beyond it by explicitly incorporating social processes and factors in the analysis of property institutions. With this common aim in mind, the book covers a wide variety of historical cases throughout space and time, from the late Middle Ages in the Czech lands and in Tuscany to the very recent de collectivisation of the countryside in former socialist countries, which will contribute rich and grounded insights to the discussion of the topic and of its implications.

Rosa Congost is senior researcher at the Centre de Recerca d'Història Rural and teaches at Facultat de Lletres in Universitat de Girona. Her research interests cover the history of landed property and agrarian social relations.

Rui Santos is senior researcher at CESNOVA and teaches at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas in Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His research interests cover historical and economic sociology and rural studies.

The twenty-eighth annual conference of CEMERS, held on 21-22 October 1994 at Binghamton University, featured thirty-three panel sessions and approximately 150 presentations. The ten essays in this volume consist of the five plenary speakers - leaders in their field - and five panel essays, each of which was reviewed for this volume. The volume comprises a body of work organised around a governing theme - modes of historicisation. Each of the essays demonstrates the practice of, or a commentary upon, a distinctive historicized criticism. By 'historicized' as contrasted with 'historical' criticism, it is meant that these essays problematicize, stretch or reconceive traditional historical practices. Challenging the notion that the production of paintings, dramatic texts or even conduct books can be read against a stable historical ground, they show that paintings, works of literature, and treatises not only participate in history but are exemplars of textual instability. The very content of these texts can be shown, in various editions, to change over time - and yet each bears a single, determinate title. In such ways the contributions gathered here all show that they have been affected by 'the new history'.

This volume explores the question of continuities and disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rather than addressing the question in a general way, it brings together a number of case studies, dealing with the changing interest in, and knowledge of Stoicism, the variations in the manuscripts of medical texts, the changing emphases within the penitential genres of 'Mirrors', developments in the philosophy of love and in attitudes towards pagans, and the transformation of the art of disputation between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. One article considers the interpretation by a Renaissance scholar (Girolamo Cardano) of the ideas of a medieval scholar (Pietro d'Abano) concerning nature and demons, while another looks at the 16th-century School of Salamanca as a synthesis of the two periods. These papers were originally presented at the second colloquium of the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales with the same title, organised jointly by two institutes that embody between them Renaissance and Medieval Studies: the Warburg Institute of London, and the Gabinete de Filosofia Medieval of Porto.

The volume includes papers by J. Marenbon (Cambridge), G. Giglioni (London), J. Kraye (London), O. Merisalo (Jyväskylä), S. Orrego-Sánchez (Santiago de Chile), A. Passot-Mannooretonil (Paris), J. J. Vila-Chã (Braga) and O. Weijers (Den Haag).

Rédigé en 363-364, le traité Contre les manichéens de Titus de Bostra est la plus importante réfutation chrétienne du manichéisme. Elle se distingue par sa composition en deux volets (réfutation rationnelle et réfutation scripturaire) et par la richesse de sa documentation (on y dénombre quelque 150 « citations manichéennes »). Préservé en grec aux deux-tiers et intégralement dans une version syriaque de la fin du IV e ou du début du V e siècle, cet ouvrage est d’une importance capitale pour l’histoire de la théologie chrétienne ancienne et du manichéisme.

Ce volume offre une double traduction française annotée du grec et du syriaque, la première dans une langue moderne, établie sur une base philologique sûre. L’édition critique gréco-syriaque et sa traduction française permettent désormais une nouvelle approche des sources manichéennes et de leur réfutation.Le texte qui a servi de base à cette traduction est celui qui a paru dans la Series Graeca du Corpus Christianorum (vol. 82, 2013). Il s’agissait de la première édition critique synoptique intégrale des textes grec et syriaque de cette oeuvre, accompagnée d’une édition critique des extraits préservés en grec dans les Sacra Parallela de Jean Damascène.

Agathe Roman est agrégée de lettres et docteur en littérature grecque (Montréal).

Thomas S. Schmidt est professeur de langue et littérature grecques à l'Université de Fribourg (Suisse).

Paul-Hubert Poirier, membre de l'Institut, est professeur d'histoire du christianisme ancien à l'Université Laval (Québec).

Il Contro gli Acefali del diacono romano Rustico, composto fra il 553 e il 564, si inserisce nel contesto della controversia dei Tre Capitoli e si propone di confutare la cristologia monofisita ('acefali' era infatti il nome con cui all'epoca si indicavano, appunto, gli esponenti di questa fazione). L’opera si presenta come un dialogo, preceduto da un breve prologo, fra due interlocutori, un ortodosso (indicato con il nome dell’autore), portavoce di una cristologia strettamente calcedonese, ed un monofisita di stampo severiano, qualificato come ‘eretico’. Nel corso della discussione Rustico sviluppa una approfondita ed originale riflessione sui concetti di natura, persona, sostanza e sussistenza, nella quale si possono riconoscere significativi punti di contatto, sia nel metodo che nei contenuti, con i trattati teologici di Boezio; e proprio nel complesso rapporto con il modello boeziano, importantissimo punto di riferimento ma anche oggetto di critica, risiede il particolare interesse di un’opera purtroppo ancora poco conosciuta, ma che sta suscitando negli ultimi anni una rinnovata attenzione da parte degli studiosi.

Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Latina presso l'Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VI secolo.

La versione latina originale del testo proposto in traduzione in questo volume è pubblicata nella collana Corpus Christianorum Series Latina con il titolo Rusticus Diaconus, Contra Acephalos (CCSL 100). I rimandi alle pagine corrispondenti dell’edizione sono forniti a margine di questa traduzione.

Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Latina presso l’Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VILatina presso l’Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VI

The walls of early modern convents suggested the existence of absolute conditions that seldom existed in reality. While the built enclosure communicated the convent’s isolation from the world outside, connections between women religious and individuals or groups outside their communities extended into and from these houses, with each constituency exploiting these associations to serve its own aims.Likewise, the walls conveyed the presence of a homogeneous and unified community where, often, differences in status, power, and other interests led to the development of internal alliances and factions.

Building on an upsurge of scholarly interest in convent networks that previously has not been focused in a single volume, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how and why such associations existed. The collection examines personal, spatial, and temporal networks that emerged in, among, and beyond convents in Italy during the early modern period. These ties were established, cultivated, or even rejected in a variety of ways that influenced nuns’ devotional lives, their relationships with patrons, and their cultural engagement and production.

These essays cover the time period before and after the Council of Trent, permitting an analysis of convents’ responses to changing power dynamics, both inside and outside the enclosure. The book also engages a broad geographical and cultural range, with chapters focusing on the centres of Florence, Venice, and Rome, the courts of Urbino, Ferrara, and Mantua, and smaller cities across Northern Italy, offering unprecedented insights into early modern Italian convent life and its varied forms and modes of expression.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art collection of essays on the socio-cultural aspects of the conversion to Christianity in Viking-Age Scandinavia and the Scandinavian colonies of the North Atlantic. The nine scholars, drawn from the disciplines of history, archaeology, and literary studies, have been brought together to address the overarching topic of how conversion affected peoples’ identities - both as individuals, and as members of broader religious, political, and social groups - on either side of the ‘divide’ between paganism and Christianity. Central to this exploration is the question of how existing and changing identities shaped the progress of conversion as a process of societal, and more specifically cultural, change.

Each of the papers in this volume provides examples of the complicated patterns of interaction, influence, and identity-modification that were characteristic of the transition from paganism to Christianity in the Viking world. The authors look for new ways of understanding and describing this gradual intermingling between the two fuzzy-edged religious communities, and they provide a challenging redefinition of the nature of conversion in the Viking Age that will be of interest both to a wide variety of medievalists and to all those who work on conversion in its theoretical and historical aspects.

The mystery of writing is that there is nothing mysterious about it.  If Saramago is right, then it is obvious that palaeography has not yet found all the keys we need if we are to enter amongst the people who gave form to the thoughts and memories of the medieval world.  In order to reveal their identity – the greatest mystery of all – it is sometimes necessary to pass over what has already been written, affirmed and maintained, and to return to the sources instead. The “Memoriali” conserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna reveal stories of men and women who created, with pen and quill veritable cathedrals of ink, indelible and sometimes of ineffable beauty. In this volume the names are collected, the commissions listed, where possible the careers and tribulations described of more than 270 copyists documented at Bologna between 1265 and 1270. In short, it is the documentary sources, not the works produced or such as have survived, on which the present  book has been based.

Les ravages corporels et leurs représentations, signes d’outrage aux corps, forment un trait d’union trop souvent négligé entre l’Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. À avoir opposé des civilisations anciennes marquées par un certain « culte de corps » à des sociétés médiévales méprisant la chair, on en aurait presque oublié que le corps y voyage à travers les savoirs, de l'histoire à la littérature, de la science au droit, de la biologie à la théologie et la philosophie. Aussi les sources nous invitent-elles à regarder au-delà des frontières historiques et culturelles qui séparent l'Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. De la plus haute Antiquité au Moyen Âge tardif, chaque outrage au corps physique est lourd de sens: faisant écho dans le corps social, il renvoie aux normes et aux assises de l’ordre politique, affirmant une morale, des valeurs et des croyances qui cimentent les corps constitués dont l’individu n’est qu’une partie. La signification des outrages aux corps diverge suivant la personnalité ou la fonction de celui qui brutalise, comme de celui qui est maltraité. Elle est aussi tributaire du système de représentation du temps et du lieu, du contexte et de l'univers culturel dans lesquels ils s'inscrivent. L’objet de cet ouvrage collectif est de comprendre comment les sociétés antiques et médiévales représentent le modelage du corps humain, à la fois au plan social, mental, politique et religieux, dans l'intention de façonner des individus adaptés à des environnements propres. Il s'agit de saisir comment les outrages et les ravages infligés aux corps physiques et symboliques offrent des clés de compréhension générale de la société qui voit le corps vivre et mourir.

In the civilisations of the Ancient World, where the holy was omnipresent, any undertaking of importance was placed under the aegis of the gods, for no other course of action was conceivable. Humankind addressed the divinity in particular through prayer, a means of communication of which Greek and Latin texts furnish numerous examples. The goal of the present work is to reflect the diversity of these speech acts to the gods in presenting a corpus of Greek and Roman pagan prayer. The authors have selected some two hundred texts covering all of the ancient period and representing different sources and genres : formulaic prayers of rituel, literary prayers in verse and prose, private writings, mystical and magical texts, and so on. They have presented the documents in the original tongue with a new translation and a commentary.

This is the companion volume to the Analytic Bibliography of Greek and Roman Prayer (Bibliographie analytique de la prière grecque et romaine) which began the collection.

Frédéric Chapot and Bernard Laurot, specialists of ancient language and literature, are associate professors at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.

Il volume raccoglie 25 studi sulla cosmologia medievale, affrontata nelle sue diverse componenti in un arco di tempo che va da Calcidio al XIV secolo. Dieci contributi investigano questioni di cosmologia ebraica e islamica, in particolare le opere di Gersonide (R. Gatti), Maimonide (L. Pepi), Avicenna (C. Di Martino), Avicenna (O. Lizzini), Sohravardî (I. Panzeca), Qûnawî (P. Spallino), i Fratelli della Purità (C. Baffioni) e le interferenze fra medioevo islamico e latino: la grande questione delle cosmologie alchemiche (M. Pereira), testi tradotti come il De secretis naturae (P. Travaglia), la dottrina del grande anno in Thebit e Pietro d’Abano (F. Seller). All’influenza della Patristica greca sul pensiero occidentale dedicano ampio spazio i lavori di E. S. Mainoldi e R. Gambino. Ulteriori studi presentano lo sviluppo del pensiero cosmologico e scientifico latino a partire da Calcidio (C. Militello), attraverso Adelardo di Bath (P. Palmeri), Guglielmo di Conches (G. Pellegrino) e documenti diversi (A. Tarabochia Canavero) sino alla ripresa dell’aristotelismo fisico, in particolare nei commenti universitari ai Meteorologica (G. Fioravanti), De caelo (C. A. Musatti, A. Vella) e in Dante (M. Gallarino, P. Falzone). La letteratura scientifica in volgare è rappresentata da Restoro d’Arezzo (U. Villani-Lubelli) e Ramon Llull (J. Gayà). A questioni di metodo storiografico è dedicato il saggio di G. Alliney, mentre un magistrale contributo di Tullio Gregory su «Cosmogonia biblica e cosmologie cristiane» traccia idealmente le coordinate generali del complesso problematico affrontato nelle sue diverse sfaccettature dagli autori del volume.

Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the ‘New Science’, as opposed to traditional book learning, which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study, however, returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’ were explained and presented in Renaissance texts, and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors, astronomers, and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars, preachers, and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

It is argued here that dialectic - the art of argumentation and reasoning - played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define, discard, and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather, they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom.

Qu'est-ce qu'un couple dans le royaume des Francs du haut Moyen Âge ? Quelles en sont les différentes formes ? À quelle réalité sociale correspond-il ? Sur quelles bases s'organisent les relations entre les conjoints ? Comment le discours et les pratiques évoluent-elles entre le VIe et le XIIe siècle ? Pour y répondre, il a fallu croiser des sources de nature diversifiée (narratives, diplomatiques, législatives, morales, administratives, poétiques, épistolaires, iconographiques et archéologiques), analysées à la lumière des questionnements sociologiques, psychologiques, anthropologiques et philosophiques actuels. Il en ressort, même si la conjugalité constitue la norme dans tous les milieux sociaux, une grande diversité de situations et de parcours. Tous les couples n'étaient pas mariés, monogames, formant une communauté de résidence, d'affection et de solidarité hiérarchisée, comme pourrait le laisser supposer la documentation écrite, monopole d'une élite, le plus souvent ecclésiastique, qui tend à présenter comme des normes ce qui n'est qu'un idéal souhaité. Quatre chapitres le montrent en analysant successivement, la diversité des formes de conjugalité, les paramètres qui influent sur le couple et lui permettent ou non de se construire et de durer, sans jamais nier son identité, les éléments qui participent à la construction de la communauté conjugale et l’identifie comme telle, ainsi que la nature et les formes de relations entre les conjoints.

This study represents a new approach to the analysis of early modern court festivals, setting the question of identity at its heart. It explores identity as it was portrayed, constructed, and upheld through court festivals within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the coronation of Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, as King of Bohemia in 1619. Structured thematically, this detailed analysis touches on core themes of early modern European history including state formation, princely courts, gender, religion, science and the natural world, and cultural encounters. In doing so, it draws on, and speaks to, scholarly literature not only from different historical sub-disciplines but also from sociology and anthropology. Ultimately, Morris argues that these court festivals provided a flexible, albeit contested, rhetoric of identity, grounded in the performance of humanist virtue. Through the performed, material, and literary rhetoric of court festivals, the concept of nobility through virtue was reworked, refined, and given a new vocabulary within the German context. This was inextricably linked with politics in light of the reforms made to the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the fifteenth century, the confessional divisions of the sixteenth century, and the mounting tensions of the early seventeenth century which were to culminate in the Thirty Years War.