EMISCA

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.

In recent years medieval drama has seen a marked revival of interest, much of it informed by an increasing appreciation of its multi-disciplinary nature. The drama of medieval Europe is not just literature; it is a social and indeed commercial event, essentially a communal enterprise, inextricably bound up with the structures of society. This collection of essays by international scholars working in collaboration examines various aspects of the inter-relationship between different European communities and the plays they performed. Its coverage of a wide range of theatres and play-types provides a critical and practical perspective on performance cultures of the Northern Middle Ages. The comparative nature of this volume has the effect of underlining drama as a true medieval mass medium.

Traditional historiography generally stresses the opposition and contradiction between secular and ecclesiastical power. By contrast, this volume focuses upon the interdependence of secular and ecclesiastical power and on the ways both secular rulers, kings, counts and other lords, and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions continuously interacted, trying to affirm the relationships between them. This selection of a historiographical introduction plus nine case-studies from England, northern France and the Low Countries enables a subtle comparison of secular and ecclesiastical links and social interactions in a series of regional and local contexts during the Central Middle Ages. The volume demonstrates that this process of negotiation led to an affirmation of shared values and contributed to the creation of common social values in medieval Europe.

Ludo Milis (Universiteit Gent), “This book, composed around three major themes (‘Texts as Tools of Power’, ‘Land and Kinship’, and ‘Conflict and Affirmation’), exemplifies how medievalists can reshape their discipline into a more responsive one. Its scope is not to offer a wide range of definitive explanations, but it shows how medievalists should try (and indeed do try) to return to a close reading of their documents. For far too long, institutional history, legal history, and histoire événémentielle have tried to monopolize power relationships and to encapsulate them in rather narrow explanatory schemes. This volume offers a broader and more encompassing approach.”

Was there a women’s movement in the thirteenth century and is such a question meaningful in its medieval context? Far from being resolved, the issue of whether women had a thirteenth-century renaissance has still decisively to unsettle the periodization of Western European history in twelfth and sixteenth-century humanist renaissances. Herbert Grundmann long ago demonstrated the participation of women in the eremitically-inspired reforming movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the production of vernacular literature. Yet it is upon his work that this volume builds, for the diocese of Liège is the key area in this development. It was from Liège that Jacques de Vitry approached the papacy to secure permission for the women of the bishopric of Liège, France and Germany to live together and to promote holiness in each other by mutual example. The seventeen contributors to this volume examine not only the beguine religious life in the southern Low Countries, but also the impact of this movement on later medieval Sweden, England and France, the new modes of influence exerted by women in their religious lives, and the revivals of feminine spirituality in the late medieval West through to contemporary North America. Research does not yet allow for a whole new synthesis, but this volume directs scholars to detailed work on specific localities and persons, with an awareness of the problems and possibilities of wider European comparisons.

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle’s treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary tradition as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century.