Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2016 - bob2016mime

The papers collected in this Festschrift in honour of Rita Beyers, Professor Emerita of Latin at the University of Antwerp and Director of the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina and Continuatio Mediaevalis, focus on ancient (especially Christian) Latin literature and its influence in the Middle Ages and beyond.

In the first section, new light is shed on some important apocryphal texts from the second to the tenth century. The second part is devoted to literary and doctrinal aspects of works produced in the patristic era. The third part brings together a number of micro-historical studies on medieval (Latin, Byzantine, and vernacular) literature. The papers of the fourth section present some little-known Neo-Latin texts and offer a fresh analysis of the reception of ancient Christian texts in modern French and English literature. The volume, which contains several critical editions of previously unedited texts, concludes with two essays musing on the art of textual editing and the quintessence of philology.

Lieu de défense, de résidence, d’exercice et de représentation du pouvoir, d’exploitation et d’administration, le château du moyen âge et du premier âge moderne est aussi lieu de culture, de fête et de divertissement. Il peut être aussi objet de regards culturels. Ce lieu se prête à la danse, aux concerts, aux réjouissances en tout genre. Trouvères et ménestrels, bateleurs et jongleurs y proposent leurs récits, leurs chants, leurs spectacles. Tout y concourt à la « théâtralisation constante du mode de vie noble ». Mais la demeure seigneuriale est aussi lieu de création, quand le maître et seigneur y accueille pour qu’ils y résident et s’y adonnent à la production écrivains, musiciens ou artistes. Une poésie de cour y a d’ailleurs pris naissance, en France, en Italie, en Allemagne. Plus tard, des troupes de comédiens y seront entretenues. Poètes et artistes venus au château l’ont ensuite célébré de leur plume ou de leur pinceau. Entre ses murs, un espace privilégié peut être celui d’une bibliothèque, éventuelle héritière d’un « cabinet de manuscrits ». Certains seigneurs sont eux-mêmes écrivains. Et si des livres reposent dans le château, le château trouvera en retour sa place dans les livres, par le texte, l’image, la description et la figuration, réalistes ou idéalisées.

Après le château lui-même, ses abords, sa gestion, voici venu le temps de « Lire, danser et chanter au château. La culture châtelaine, XIII e-XVII e siècles », thème du quatrième colloque de la Fondation van der Burch au château-fort d’Écaussinnes-Lalaing en mai 2013.

Ruralia X includes 27 papers dealing with agrarian technologies in the medieval landscape as seen in different European countries. The subject areas include cultivation, livestock husbandry, gardening, viticulture and woodland management – interpreting the concept of agrarian production in a broad sense – studied mainly on the basis of archaeology, but also using iconography, documentary evidence and archaeo-environmental approaches.

Ruralia X, marks an important step on the way towards interpreting innovation, as well as understanding the varieties of agrarian activity from a Europe-wide perspective.

Authors from 14 countries provide a broad overview of the current issues, complemented by extensive bibliographies. Ruralia X represents one of the current fields of European archaeological research and offers a solid foundation for further comparative studies.

This book provides a fresh insight into European medieval culture by focusing on the concept of the marvellous as it was depicted in medieval writings. Drawing together papers that were presented at the Aspects of the Marvellous in Medieval Literature conference, held at the University of L’Aquila in November 2012, the volume takes a broad multicultural and multilingual approach that offers new perspectives onto the various kinds of mirabile and their common themes in texts from across Europe. Contributions to this volume pay equal attention to both Latin and vernacular writings, and cover aspects of the marvellous in fields as diverse as medieval Latin literature, Romance, Germanic, and Celtic philology, miracles and mirabilia, monsters and fairies, strange creatures and fantastic worlds. Above all, by expanding analysis through different literatures, languages, and literary genres, the volume not only provides an opportunity to compare and contrast key themes and features of these texts, but also casts new light onto the making of our own cultural identity.

« Bernard de Chartres disait que nous sommes comme des nains assis sur les épaules de géants de sorte que nous pouvons voir davantage [de choses] qu’eux et plus loin non certes à cause de l’acuité de notre propre vue ou de la hauteur de notre corps, mais parce que nous sommes soulevés en hauteur et élevés à une hauteur gigantesque » (Jean de Salisbury, Metalogicon, III, 4).

Les géants de l’adage sont l’incarnation de l’autorité du passé, si prégnante dans la culture du Moyen Âge. Mais la tradition, qui est à la fois contrainte et force, porte en elle les germes d’une véritable inventivité. La nouveauté se nourrit de l’ancien, pour le transformer et le dépasser.

Issues d'un colloque interdisciplinaire organisé à Poitiers en 2011, les études de ce volume se proposent d'analyser la nature, le contenu, les modalités ou la finalité des emprunts pour appréhender des phénomènes plus complexes tels que la recomposition ou le déplacement, fondés plutôt sur la notion de référence, d’allusion, d’influence, de choix. Passifs ou délibérés, individuels ou collectifs, éphémères ou durables, ces réaménagements peuvent être considérés comme autant de créations nouvelles témoignant de la vitalité du Moyen Âge et de sa capacité à façonner un paysage culturel en perpétuel mouvement. Les éditeurs du volume - Claude Andrault-Schmitt, Edina Bozoky et Stephen Morrison -, sont professeurs à l'Université de Poitiers et membres du Centre d'études supérieures de Civilisation médiévale.

This book portrays a little-known phenomenon in Bohemian cultural and political history - the visual culture that grew up in the environment of Reformation churches in Bohemia from the time of the Hussites until the defeat of the Estates by the Habsburg coalition at White Mountain in 1620. It provides the first comprehensive overview of a forgotten era of artistic production over a period of approximately two hundred years, when most of the population of Bohemia professed non-Catholic faiths.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a unique situation arose in Bohemia, with five main Christian denominations (Utraquists, Lutherans, the Unity of Brethren, Calvinists, and Catholics) gradually coming to function alongside each other, with a number of other religious groups also active. The main churches, which had a fundamental influence on political stability in the state, were the majority Utraquists and the minority Catholics. Yet the essays of this book establish that despite the particularities of the Bohemian situation, the religious trends of Bohemia were an integral part of the process of Reformation across Europe.

Featuring over fifty illustrations including manuscript illumination, panel painting, and architecture, the book also presents the surviving cultural products of the four non-Catholic Christian denominations, ranging from the more moderate to radical Reformation cultures. The book also analyses the attitudes of these denominations to religious representations, and illuminates their uses of visual media in religious and confessional communication. The book thus opens up both the Reformation culture of Bohemia and its artistic heritage to an international audience.

Recent scholarship has suggested that the religious divide between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, although ever-present (and at times even violently so), did not stop individuals and groups from forming ties and expanding them in more intricate ways than previously thought. Moreover, these networks appear to have functioned with an apparent disregard towards any confessional and religious differences. Nevertheless, this was by no means a straightforward or simple situation; both the theological background to how each faith viewed ‘other’ beliefs, as well as the strong social, religious, and authoritative circles that at the least critiqued, even if they did not entirely discourage such contacts, created a formidable opposition to these networks. The articles in this book were presented as papers during an international workshop at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2010. In these presentations and discussions, the premise of interfaith relations and networks was thoroughly explored across Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the eastern Hungarian frontier, and from England to Italy throughout the high and later medieval period. In this volume, the contributors explore a number of phenomena through different disciplinary approaches. Ties of an economic and cultural nature are examined, and attention is paid to social contacts and networks in the fields of art and the sciences, and matters of daily life. The picture that emerges is altogether more nuanced and diverse than the bipolar paradigm that has dominated previous scholarship.

Focusing on routes and journeys throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East in the period between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century, this multi-disciplinary book draws on travel narratives, chronicles, maps, charters, geographies, and material remains in order to shed new light on the experience of travelling in the Middle Ages.

The contributions gathered here explore the experiences of travellers moving between Latin Europe and the Holy Land, between southern Italy and Sicily, and across Germany and England, from a range of disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, they offer unique insights into the experience, conditions, conceptualization, and impact of human movement in medieval Europe. Many essays place a strong emphasis on the methodological problems associated with the study of travel and its traces, and the collection is enhanced by the juxtaposition of scholarly work taking different approaches to this challenge. The papers included here engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue and are supported by a discursive, contextualizing introduction by the editors.

Après un premier volume consacré à la traduction intralinguale de l’ancien français au français moderne, ce deuxième ouvrage d’un projet en trois volets, portant sur des aspects peu étudiés de la translatio studii médiévale, se propose d’aborder dans une même réflexion les questions de la traduction empêchée et de la traduction manipulée. Les chapitres qui le composent étudient selon des approches complémentaires aussi bien des sources manipulées que des sources non traduites. Ils permettent de révéler des différences typologiques et génériques et de distinguer plus clairement ces deux frontières de la traduction médiévale.

Se dégage ainsi de la diversité des approches et des sujets un enseignement majeur : l’activité de sélection, de philtre, de mystification, de dissimulation est à la fois le résultat d’un acte individuel et d’une stratégie plurielle. Celle-ci n’est pas seulement le fruit d’un oubli plus ou moins volontaire, plus ou moins conscient, de pans entiers de la culture, des sciences, des lettres exprimées dans d’autres langues et qui ne franchissent pas le seuil de leur idiome d’origine. Elle est aussi à la source d’un certain nombre d’ouvrages revendiquant une filiation littérale qui apparaît aujourd’hui comme fantaisiste ou fictive, comme c’est le cas avec le « topos du livre source ». Comment interpréter cette disposition à la falsification propre à des clercs nourris de morale chrétienne ? Comment expliquer que ces auteurs ne manifestent aucune réserve critique devant les supercheries qu’ils accumulent avec une évidente délectation ou une peur inquiète du vide ? Comment analyser le recours évident au stéréotype propre à l’art littéraire de leur temps : la « nostalgie du passé » ?

Au terme de ce parcours critique, on constate que la traduction empêchée et la traduction manipulée font apparaître plus clairement les confins et les différences structurelles entre une translatio studii identitaire et une traduction en français savante.

Claudio Galderisi est professeur de langues et littératures de la France médiévale à l’Université de Poitiers (CESCM). Il a dirigé les trois volumes des Translations médiévales. Cinq siècles de traductions en français au Moyen Âge (xi e-xv e s.) (Brepols, 2011). Il a codirigé avec Jean-Jacques Vincensini le volume sur la traduction intralinguale (Brepols 2015).

Jean-Jacques Vincensini est professeur de langue et littératures médiévales à l’Université de Tours (CESR). Il a édité et traduit notamment les Romans de Mélusine de Jean d’Arras et de Couldrette et prépare l’édition et la traduction de l’Escoufle de Jean Renart. Il a codirigé avec Claudio Galderisi le volume sur la traduction intralinguale.

Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful-and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. These essays explore also the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.

Souvent présentée comme une période charnière, la « Renaissance du xii e siècle » voit fleurir les écoles : école de Laon, de Saint-Victor, de Paris, de Chartres, école d’Abélard aussi, auxquelles on peut ajouter le groupe formé par les Porrétains ou bien encore les « écoles du cloître » (chartreux, cisterciens, clunisiens). L’« âge des écoles » marque ainsi le passage d’une forme de vie intellectuelle à une autre, l’évolution de la culture monastique vers la culture urbaine, qui verra la naissance de l’université de Paris au xiii e siècle et l’avènement de la scolastique. Au moment où se produit un tel essor, la littérature en langue romane connaît une seconde naissance. La langue d’oc voit s’épanouir la lyrique tandis qu’au nord de la Loire, dès les dernières années du xi e siècle, les chansons de geste se répandent, avant que les romans et la poésie des trouvères ne fassent leur apparition. Loin d’être étrangers l’un à l’autre, ces deux phénomènes entretiennent des rapports nombreux et complexes qui valent d’autant plus d’être étudiés que le retentissement de ces écoles de pensée sur la littérature romane est perceptible bien au-delà du xii e siècle. Telle est l’ambition de cet ouvrage, qui propose un bilan historiographique, de nombreuses études de cas et une réflexion à caractère épistémologique.

One of the most important texts in the history of medieval philosophy, the Book of Causes was composed in Baghdad in the 9th century mainly from the Arabic translations of Proclus’ Elements of Theology. In the 12th century, it was translated from Arabic into Latin, but its importance in the Latin tradition was not properly studied until now, because only 6 commentaries on it were known. Our exceptional discovery of over 70 unpublished Latin commentaries mainly on the Book of Causes, but also on the Elements of Theology, prove, for the first time, that the two texts where widely disseminated and commented on throughout many European universities (Paris, Oxford, Erfurt, Krakow, Prague), from the 13th to the 16th century. These two volumes provide 14 editions (partial or complete) of the newly-discovered commentaries, and yields, through historical and philosophical analyses, new and essential insights into the influence of Greek and Islamic Neoplatonism in the Latin philosophical traditions.

Artefacts and environmental remains are abundant from archaeological excavations across Europe, but until now they have most commonly been used to accompany broader narratives built on historical sources and studies of topography and buildings, rather than being studied as important evidence in their own right. The papers in this volume aim to redress the balance by taking an environmental and artefact-based approach to life in medieval Europe.

The contributions included here address central themes such as urban identities, the nature of towns and their relationship with their hinterlands, provisioning processes, and the role of ritual and religion in everyday life. Case studies from across Europe encourage a comparative approach between town and country, and provide a pan-European perspective to current debates.

The volume is divided into four key parts: an exploration of the processes of provisioning; an assessment of the dynamics of urban population; an examination of domestic life; and a discussion of the status quaestionis and future potential of urban environmental archaeology. Together, these sections make a significant contribution to medieval archaeology and offer new and unique insights into the conditions of everyday life in medieval Europe.

This volume presents cultural studies approaches to different modes of memoria (the original medieval way of commemoration), taking into account specific confessional contexts. It mainly focuses on the consequences of political, religious and social reforms in the period from 1200 to 1800. Scholars from multiple subject areas in the field of cultural studies evaluate if, and to what extent, reform processes and political or social change have influenced different practices of memoria.

Since customs of commemoration of the dead (and the living) serve as a means of self-reassurance for a society, they allow significant insights into what the respective societies were grounded upon. This volume delivers the first discipline-specific and methodologically diverse approach to the consequences of different reforms on memoria.

In this way this overview creates a ‘history of memoria’ throughout the centuries.

This volume explores the architecture and configuration of Romanesque cathedrals in Europe, especially around the Mediterranean, paying special attention to liturgical ritual, furnishings, iconography, and urban context. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, cultural and artistic interchange around the Mediterranean gave rise to the first truly European art period in Medieval Western Europe, commonly referred to as ‘Romanesque’. A crucial aspect of this integrative process was the mobility of artists, architects and patrons, as well as the capacity to adopt new formulas and integrate them into existing patterns. Some particularly creative centers exported successful models, while others became genuine melting pots. All this took shape over the substrate of Roman Antiquity, which remained in high esteem and was frequently reused.

In these studies, Romanesque cathedrals are employed as a lens with which to analyze the complexity and dynamics of the cultural landscape of southern and central Europe from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. The architecture of every cathedral is the result of a long and complicated process of morphogenesis, defined by spatial conditions and the availability of building materials. Their interior arrangements and imagery largely reflected ritual practice and the desire to express local identities. The various contributions to this volume discuss the architecture, interior, and urban setting of Romanesque cathedrals and analyze the factors which helped to shape them. In so doing, the focus is both on the influence of patrons and on more bottom-up factors, including community practices.

What was it like to experience the medieval world through one’s senses? Can we access those past sensory experiences, and use our senses to engage with the medieval world? How do texts, objects, spaces, manuscripts, and language itself explore, define, exploit, and control the senses of those who engage with them?

This collection of essays seeks to explore these challenging questions. To do so is inevitably to take an interdisciplinary and context-focused approach. As a whole, this book develops understanding of how different fields speak to one another when they are focused on human experiences, whether of those who used our sources in the medieval period, or of those who seek to understand and to teach those sources today.

Articles by leading researchers in their respective fields examine topics including: Old English terminology for the senses, effects of the digitisation of manuscripts on scholarship, Anglo-Saxon explorations of non-human senses, scribal sensory engagement with poetry, the control of sound in medieval drama, bird sounds and their implications for Anglo-Saxon sensory perception, how goldwork controls the viewing gaze, legalised sensory impairment, and the exploitation of the senses by poetry, architecture, and cult objects.

The compelling world of the Vikings and their descendants, preserved in the sagas, poetry, and mythology of medieval Iceland, has been an important source of inspiration to artists and writers across Europe, as well as to scholars devoted to editing and interpreting the manuscript texts. A variety of creative ventures have been born of the processes of imagining this distant ‘hyperborean’ world. The essays in this volume, by scholars from Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the UK, examine the scholarly and artistic reception of a variety of Old Norse texts from the beginnings of the manuscript tradition in twelfth-century Iceland to contemporary poetry, crime fiction, and graphic novels produced in Britain, Ireland, Italy, and Iceland. The influence of Old Norse literature is further explored in the context of Shakespeare’s plays, eighteenth-century Italian opera, the Romantic movement in Sweden and Denmark, and the so-called ‘nordic renaissance’ of the late nineteenth century (including the works of August Strindberg and William Morris), as well as in some of the political movements of twentieth-century northern Europe. Interest in Old Norse literature is charted as it spread beyond intellectual centres in Europe and out to a wider reading and viewing public. The influence of the ‘hyperborean muse’ is evident throughout this book, as the idea of early Nordic culture has been refashioned to reflect contemporary notions and ideals.

The volume serves as an introduction to what its editors have chosen to call the “artistic cultures” prevalent during the Middle Ages in the region of the South Caucasus. Although far from comprehensive in terms of material, chronology and geography, the volume intends to raise awareness of a region whose artistic wealth and cultural diversity has remained relatively unknown to most medievalists. Stretching from Eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East, and from the snow-capped Great Caucasus mountain range in the north to the Armenian highlands in the south, medieval southern Caucasia was originally divided into the kingdom of Caucasian Albania, Greater and Lesser Armenia, and western and eastern Georgia, that is, the kingdoms of Lazica (Egrisi) and Iberia (Kartli) respectively. Together, these entities made the South Caucasus a true frontier region between Europe and Asia and a place of transcultural exchange. Its official Christianization began as early as in the fourth century, even before Constantine the Great founded Constantinople or had himself been converted to Christianity. During the subsequent centuries, the region became a well-connected and strategic buffer zone for its neighboring and occupant Byzantine, Persian, Islamic, Seljuk and Mongol powers. And although subject to constantly shifting borders, the medieval kingdoms of the South Caucasus remained an internally diverse yet shared and distinct geographical and historical unity. Far from being isolated, these cultures were part of a much wider medieval universe. Because of the transcultural nature and elevated artistic quality of their objects and monuments, they have much to offer the field of art history, which has recently been challenged to think more globally in terms of transculturation, movement and appropriation among medieval cultures.

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.

Thomas Aquinas is still most widely known for his works in systematic theology (Summa theologiae) and as a commentator of Aristotle. Recent decades, however, have seen a revived interest in Aquinas as a biblical scholar. The essays gathered in this volume explore the richness of his biblical commentaries by analyzing the hermeneutical tools employed in his reading of Scripture and investigating the contemporary relevance of his biblical exegesis. Its goal is to familiarize the contemporary reader with an indispensable dimension of his scholarly activity: as a master in Sacred Scripture (magister in sacra pagina) Aquinas taught theology as a form of speculative reading of the revealed Word of God and hence the reading of the various books of the Bible constituted the axis of his scriptural didactics. Altogether, the nineteen contributions in the volume offers an up-to-date analysis of Aquinas’s contribution to medieval biblical exegesis and points to ways in which it can enrich contemporary debates on the relation between exegesis and systematic theology.

Contributors: Christopher Baglow, Timothy F. Bellamah, Lluís Clavell, Gilbert Dahan, Leo J. Elders, Jeremy Holmes, Daniel Keating, Matthew Levering, Enrique Martínez, Miroslaw Mróz, Mauricio Narváez, Marco Passarotti, Matthew J. Ramage, Elisabeth Reinhardt, Margherita Maria Rossi, Piotr Roszak, Olivier-Thomas Venard, Jörgen Vijgen, Robert J. Woźniak.

Ce volume réunit 27 articles que Geneviève Hasenohr a consacrés à la littérature de dévotion médiévale entre 1978 et 2007. Études et éditions de textes romans font toucher du doigt ce que furent au quotidien les modèles de vie chrétienne et les lectures spirituelles proposés aux laïcs en France entre e et e siècle, leur fonds monastique commun et leur touche propre. Cette reprise est complétée par la publication actualisée d’une documentation inédite, attendue depuis des décennies par les médiévistes : une partie des notices documentaires primitivement destinées à prendre place dans le t. 2 (jamais paru) du vol. VIII du Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters : La littérature ançaise aux e et e siècles (t.1, Heidelberg, 1988). uelques études plus philologiques, une bibliographie de l’auteur et plusieurs index complètent la sélection.

Chartiste, ancien membre de l’École Française de Rome, Geneviève Hasenohr est une philologue, historienne des textes de spiritualité médiévaux en langue romane. Elle a dirigé la Section romane de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS) et enseigné à l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne ainsi qu’à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études. Elle est correspondante de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.