BOB2023MOME

This is a novel, interdisciplinary study of the Mongol military campaign in Eastern Europe (1241–1242) — the North, as thirteenth-century Europeans saw the region — in the works of contemporary English chronicler, Matthew Paris of St Albans Monastery. Tracing the journey of his sources, the volume explores thirteenth-century information networks against the backdrop of the struggle between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV.

Parallel to the history of information, the subject of the study is the Chronica majora and its afterlife, Matthew’s chronicle world where the sometimes fictitious (and often very real) episodes of the Mongol story unfold. Tracing major landmarks in the meta-history of the Chronica majora, the author wishes to emancipate Matthew Paris as a historian — one in the series of a multitude of others who continue to write and rewrite the history of the Mongol invasion across centuries of historiography.

The volume is a handy companion both to scholars of English historiography and those who want to read critically the oft-cited primary sources of the history of the Mongol military operations in Europe.

Les œuvres en vers les plus célèbres d’Abélard sont ces poèmes d’amour composés pour Héloïse au temps qu’il la séduisait ; mais ils sont perdus, et c’est en vain qu’on les cherche. La célébrité de ces textes inconnus a laissé dans l’ombre d’autres poèmes qui, eux, sont bien parvenus jusqu’à nous. Eux aussi ont été composés pour Héloïse, d’une certaine manière ; eux aussi sont, d’une certaine manière, des produits de l’amour, et même des poèmes d’amour. Il s’agit des hymnes que, dans les années 1130, Abélard composa pour le monastère dont Héloïse était la supérieure, le Paraclet. Leur série, presque complète, constitue au fil de l’année liturgique un itinéraire spirituel et intellectuel d’une cohérence inégalée. Ces hymnes ne sont pas seulement des témoins d’une tentative quasiment inouïe dans l’histoire du christianisme de réformer la totalité de la liturgie : ils sont aussi la pensée d’un théologien exceptionnel coulée dans les vers d’un poète génial. L’Hymnaire du Paraclet mérite bien ainsi, à de multiples titres, d'être appelé un monument de la culture occidentale. Ce volume offre à la fois le texte latin original, entièrement établi et contrôlé sur les manuscrits, et, en regard, l'une des premières traductions complètes de l'Hymnaire, et la première en français.

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

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

Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy, the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it, Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts, Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English, it proposes, was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.

At the heart of any story of metamorphosis lies the issue of identity, and the tales of the werwulf (lit. ‘man-wolf’) are just as much about the wolf as about the man. What are the constituents of the human in general? What symbolic significance do they hold? How do they differ for different types of human? How would it affect the individual if one or more of these elements were to be subtracted?

Focusing on a group of Old Norse-Icelandic werewolf narratives, many of which have hitherto been little studied, this insightful book sets out to answer these questions by exploring how these texts understood and conceptualized what it means to be human. At the heart of this investigation are five factors key to the werewolf existence - skin, clothing, food, landscape, and purpose - and these are innovatively examined through a cross-disciplinary approach that carefully teases apart the interaction between two polarizations: the external and social, and the interior and psychological. Through this approach, the volume presents a comprehensive new look at the werewolf not only as a supernatural creature and a literary motif, but also as a metaphor that bears on the relationship between human and non-human, between Self and Other, and that is able to situate the Old-Norse texts into a broader intellectual discourse that extends beyond medieval Iceland and Norway.