Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Original Archive v2016 - bobar16mimeo

Le moyen âge latin fut par définition une période de traduction. Soucieux d’avoir à leur disposition les textes d’autres cultures, les médiévaux n’ont eu de cesse de transférer d’une langue à l’autre les œuvres de l’Antiquité classique ainsi que l’héritage arabe et hébreu avec les moyens dont ils disposaient à leur époque.

Afin d’avoir une meilleure connaissance de leurs méthodes de travail et des problèmes inhérents au passage d’une langue à l’autre, il est important de retrouver les manuscrits qui ont servi de base de travail aux traducteurs. On y trouve des notes de leur main qui expliquent les difficultés rencontrées, les hésitations dans l’utilisation d’un terme plutôt qu’un autre pour rendre en latin un vocable de la langue source ainsi que des notes marginales qui sont autant de remarques philologiques, matériel de première main pour notre compréhension et notre connaissance des niveaux linguistiques tant des traducteurs que des utilisateurs depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à la Renaissance.

D’autre part, lorsqu’elles existent, les préfaces laissées par les traducteurs en tête de leur travail constituent des documents de première importance pour notre compréhension de leurs problèmes et pour la reconstitution de la méthode utilisée pour les résoudre.

On trouvera dans ce volume beaucoup de matériel encore inédit. Les recherches menées sur les manuscrits ont permis de voir plus clair dans la problématique propre aux traductions faites tant sur le grec, l’arabe, le syriaque, l’hébreu qu’en langues vulgaires. Les exposés sont dus à des spécialistes des divers domaines concernés.

The phrase ‘cultural materialism’, names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly focused on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token, historians - whose work, of necessity, has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture - have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship, for example, has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discources.

The fifteenth century was of crucial importance for the Low Countries. After centuries of gradual political disintegration, a rapid unification took place during the reign of the Burgundian dukes, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. How did this new ‘state’ work? To most people the political high-points are well known; but the slow process of integration that had by then started remains, by contrast, largely unknown. In this process, the regional institutions, which were thoroughly modernised by the Burgundian dukes, seem to have played a key role. The first part of this volume discusses the role of these regional institutions. In particular it studies the role in the principalities of Brabant, Holland and Flanders of civil servants as formal and informal ‘powerbrokers’ between central government and subjects in the Low Countries during the Burgundian period.

The Low Countries, however, cannot be treated in isolation from its neighbours: they were situated literally on the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire and France and there were intensive commercial and political contacts with England. Therefore, by way of comparison, the second part of this volume contrasts developments in other European countries, in particular, France, the Empire and England.

The articles in this volume are written by a group of distinguished specialists in the field of administrative history, working at universities in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The anniversary of Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597, and the subsequent christianization of England, made conversion an obvious theme for the 1997 International Medieval Congress. It was also a theme which attracted massive interest, and not just from early medievalists interested in the christianization of England and its near-contemporary parallels. This volume presents reworkings of 28 of these contributions.

The Early Middle Ages are represented in a number of papers concerned with Central and Eastern Europe and as far east as Georgia. Interest in the Baltic region took this aspect of the christianization of Europe well into the fourteenth century. Papers on these regions constitute a good proportion of the present volume, and they provide a very useful point of entry into work currently being done on christinization in areas which are less well known to most historians than is Western Europe not least because of the range of languages involved.

With respect to later periods of the Middle Ages two issues predominated: one was the interface between Christians and Muslims in Spain and in the Holy Land and also between Christians and Jews once again in Spain, but also in England, and more generally in Western Europe. The other was the rather more theological question of the nature of conversion, as discussed by Aquinas, and in Franciscan writings. This wide-ranging volume concentrates on historical approaches to the topic. The different types of questions posed and materials used are a fascinating indication of the different interpretations to be found among specialists in different fields.

Christianization, as a process affecting complete peoples, or at least large groups, attracts attention, as does conversion of the individual. By putting these varying approaches together, this collection indicates the range of current work on christianization and conversion history and the range itself, quite apart from the individual studies, is an eye-opener.

Der vorliegende Band enthält die Beiträge des internationalen Kolloquiums Die Dionysius-Rezeption im Mittelalter — La réception du Pseudo-Denys durant le moyen âge — The Reception of Pseudo-Dionysius in the Middle Ages, das vom 8. bis 11. April 1999 in Sofia unter der Schirmherrschaft der S.I.E.P.M. stattfand. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Rezeption der unter dem Namen des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita überlieferten Werke, die seit ihrem Erscheinen in Byzanz am Beginn des 6. Jahrhunderts und seit der Mitte des 9. Jahrhunderts im lateinischen Abendland einen großen Einfluß auf die europäische Geistesgeschichte ausgeübt haben. Das Corpus Dionysiacum ist nicht nur ein außerordentlich einflußreicher Traditionsstrang des Neuplatonismus bis in die Neuzeit hinein, es stellt darüber hinaus ein europäisches ‘cross-culture’-Phänomen dar, das auf exklusive Weise den griechisch-byzantinischen und den lateinisch-abendländischen Kulturkreis verbindet. Die Erforschung dieser byzantinisch-lateinischen Austauschbeziehung und damit verbunden eine weiterführende Sicht auf die Denkrichtungen der mittelalterlichen europäischen Kultur im Westen und im Osten vor dem Hintergrund der verschiedenen Interpretationen des Werkes des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita ist das Grundanliegen dieses Bandes.

Ce livre rassemble une série de communications présentées lors d’un Colloque organisé à Rome sur Les prologues médiévaux. Le but était de montrer l’importance de ce genre littéraire et tout l’intérêt que les chercheurs peuvent tirer de l’analyse des introductions. Interdisciplinaire par excellence, le sujet touche tous les médiévistes et à ce titre mérite qu’on s’y attarde puisque à ce jour, malgré des recherches ponctuelles et des études consacrées à des domaines très particuliers, il n’a pas été l’objet d’études systématiques.

De nombreuses questions sont abordées par les auteurs: on peut citer parmi d’autres les problèmes terminologiques, les relations entre le titre d’une œuvre et son prologue, l’évolution du genre littéraire depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Age, la comparaison entre différents genres littéraires ainsi que l’examen de prologues en langues différentes: grecque, latine ou française.

Les articles publiés dans cet ouvrage permettront de faire un premier tour de la question et d’aboutir à une série de conclusions qui, même si elles ne sont pas définitives, feront progresser nos connaissances en la matière. Ce volume d’actes devrait constituer pour les médiévistes un point de référence sur le sujet.

In this themed collection by literary, historical and archaeological scholars, the study of medieval women is confidently and freshly mainstream. Profiting from the development of newly flexible models of gender, literacy, the political, the social, and the domestic, the volume is non-separatist, exploratory both of new source materials and new readings of established sources, and able to consider the broadest implications for the study of medieval culture without simply re-absorbing medieval women into invisibility. Grouped under the headings of matters of reading, of conduct and place, the essays move from legal cases to actual buildings and conceptions of the household, from conduct books to chronicles and romances, from saints’ lives to the medieval unconscious and back again, exemplifying the mature interdisciplinarity of current work on medieval women.

Les échanges entre Orient et Occident au Moyen Age ont fait l’objet de nombreux travaux récents. En histoire des sciences, l’attention a porté en priorité sur l’activité de traduction et de rédaction dans l’Espagne arabo-latine et l’Italie méridionale. Le colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve s’est proposé d’explorer les contacts scientifiques dans un contexte moins étudié, les états latins de Palestine, du XIe au XIIIe s. Les contributions intéressent les trois principales cultures en présence: arabe, byzantine et latine. L’éventail des disciplines abordées couvre l’alchimie, l’astronomie, l’histoire naturelle, les mathématiques, la médecine; une place est faite à l’histoire des techniques, ainsi qu’à certains milieux porteurs: la ville d’Antioche, la cour de Frédéric II de Hohenstaufen. On découvre ainsi que le Proche Orient des Croisades n’a pas seulement été un champ de bataille, mais qu’il y a eu place aussi pour des découvertes, des échanges, des influences réciproques.

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

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

The essays presented here cover a range of topics and periods and testify to the breadth and depth of “boundaries” as a concept. The concept’s origins are located in the work of ethnographers, whose most cogent representative is Fredrik Barth. In his seminal work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, a collection of articles by Barth and others published in 1967, he shifted the scholarly discussion about ethnicity away from particular attributes that define ethnic groups to the boundaries that separate them from another. Boundaries were less significant for what they enclosed than for their very nature and purpose. The disciplines that make most use of the concept of “crossing boundaries” are the youngest, such as feminist and gender studies or, more generally, cultural studies.

The first section of the collection consists of literary approaches to boundaries, ranging widely in subject matter from Norman drama to sixteenth-century goodnight ballads. In the second part, the concept of boundaries is brought to bear on the existentia1 plight of Byzantine refugees, Marian devotion in Milanese music, witch hunters’ manuals and finally strangers in Tudors England. In every case, literary texts come into play, but most of these authors seek to apply the concept of transgression and boundaries to their texts in different ways. Individually and as a group, the essays contribute fresh insights into wel1-known and some less familiar works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.