EMISCA

I contributi raccolti nel volume permettono di ricostruire alcuni nuclei storico- dottrinali sulla natura dei sensi interni e sulle complesse relazioni anima-corpo; tale problema attraversa l’intera storia della filosofia, dalla tarda antichità fino al radicale mutamento di prospettiva operato da Cartesio, Spinoza, Malebranche e dai grandi maestri del Seicento. Da queste ricerche emergono le differenze semantico-concettuali e le diverse valutazioni della phantasia, della imaginatio, intesa come cogitatio, o ragionamento estimativo e valutativo, e degli altri sensi interni — mutamenti e novità introdotti soprattutto grazie alla mediazione dei filosofi e degli scienziati arabi. Questi nuovi orizzonti del filosofare costituiscono, secondo modalità gnoseologiche e ontologiche variabili da un filosofo all’altro, il sostrato delle noetiche e delle metafisiche della tradizione aristotelica medievale e rinascimentale. Per quanto concerne la filosofia moderna, gli studi qui condotti mostrano come il nesso anima-corpo non si costituisca attraverso la zione della sensibilità interna o esterna intesa nei modi tradizionali delle correnti filosofiche tardo-antiche e medievali, ma si configuri piuttosto come problema dell’identità della persona psico-fisica e della sua stessa individualità. Tali ricerche evidenziano, quindi, da una parte quanto sia complesso l’orizzonte delle teorie delle funzioni mediane della psiche, tra intelletto e senso; dall’altra, come esse non siano riducibili agli stereotipi modelli interpretativi monisti o dualisti — fisicisti o spiritualisti — tanto della tradizione antica e medievale quanto di quella moderna.

Whoever is curious about emotions and their expression in the Old Regime has to discover Johan Huizinga’s works. From his point of view, even if it is a real challenge to comprehend the world of the mind and of the sentimental life, historians of medieval and early modern societies cannot help themselves from examining character studies to reconcile daily life and historicity. Anglo-Saxon studies have proved since the beginning of the seventies that we can give historical meaning to fierce emotions like anger and fear, to mental suffering characterized by tears and pain, or even to the sudden feeling of aesthetic pleasure, mystical ecstasy and delight… all those emotions which put the breath of life into anonymous people crowded into our historical studies. Outside the debates of psycho-history, our study views the topic of emotions from the angle of social construction and civilization’s process.

The town reveals itself as an ideal context within which to articulate values, mentalities, customs and aesthetics. From the marketplace to the court of justice, from the procession route to the scaffold, from the theatre stage to the scene of riots, the town concentrates in its heart a public space where both delicate and strong emotions are repeatedly enacted. The purpose of this book is to develop different approaches —according to sphere, events, social categories, social relations, gender, etc.— and thus to suggest a more precise analysis of emotion as a means of communication inside the town. Three urban social «spheres» where divergent emotions were publicly expressed, manipulated, discussed and represented are put into focus: that of the urban revolt, that of the urban administration of justice and that of the staging of urban theatre and poetry.

Au cœur des divers articles de cet ouvrage collectif sont quatre coutumiers, rédigés au cours d’une centaine d’année environ à partir de la fin du Xe siècle, qui décrivent la vie quotidienne et liturgique de l’abbaye de Cluny. Deux objectifs principaux motivèrent la création de ce volume: premièrement mettre en valeur la richesse inégalée des coutumiers monastiques pour les chercheurs, à commencer par les médiévistes, toutes disciplines confondues, et deuxièmement faciliter l’emploi de ces sources qui peuvent paraître à première vue difficiles d’un abord. Seule une approche multidisciplinaire pouvait permettre d’illustrer tout l’éventail d’informations contenues dans ces sources; c’est pourquoi les éditrices ont réuni des études extrêmement variées mais complémentaires, qui mettent bien en valeur la richesse de ces écrits. Parmi les thèmes principaux abordés en ce livre se trouvent la genèse et la transmission des coutumiers, la relation entre ces textes et la pratique, l’information qu’ils offrent sur la fonction des espaces monastiques ainsi que la ritualisation de la vie communautaire.

At the heart of the various articles in this book are four customaries, compiled over the course of nearly a hundred years beginning at the end of the tenth century, that describe daily life and liturgy at the abbey of Cluny. Two principal objectives motivated the creation of the present volume of essays: first, to bring out the unequaled richness of these monastic customaries for scholars, primarily medievalists in all disciplines; and second, to facilitate the use of these sources, which can be challenging at first sight. Drawing upon the multiple disciplines needed to account for the full range of information presented by the customaries, the editors have brought together varied and complementary approaches to these multifaceted documents. Among the principal themes common to the studies in this volume are the genesis and transmission of the customaries, the relationship between texts and practice, and the evidence they offer for the function of monastic spaces as well as for the ritualization of communal life.

Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) has been recognized as a poet, early humanist and feminist precursor but rarely as political theorist whose works were intended to have a direct impact on the tumultuous politics of her time. The essays in this collection focus on Christine as a political writer and provide an important resource for those wishing to understand her political thought. They locate her political writing in the late medieval tradition, discussing her indebtedness to Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine as well as her transformations of their thought. They also illuminate Christine’s ‘political epistemology’: her understanding of political wisdom as a part of theology, the knowledge of God. New light is thrown on the circumstances which prompted Christine to write on political issues and on her attitude to Isabeau of Bavaria. These essays show that Christine’s originality consisted in her capacity to modify and feminize the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism through the use of elements of Christian imagery, in particular Mariology, in order to construct an image of the virtuous and prudent monarch which had lost the explicitly manly and warlike character of the Aristotelian phronimos. This reconfigured image of the monarch lent itself to the extension which she developed in her more feminist works, which demonstrated the prudence of women and their capacity, in times of need, to function as authoritative political figures.

Imagining the Book offers a snapshot of current research in English manuscript study in the pre-modern period on the inter-related topics of patrons and collectors, compilers, editors and readers, and identities beyond the book. This volume responds to the recent development and institutionalization of ‘History of the Book’ within the wider discipline. Scholars working in the pre-printing era with the material vestiges of a predominantly manuscript culture are currently establishing their own models of production and reception. Research in this area is now an accepted part of twenty-first century medieval studies. Within such a context, it is frequently observed that scribal culture found imaginative ways to deal with the technological watersheds represented by the transition from memory to written record, roll to codex, or script to print. In such an ‘eventful’ environment, texts and books not infrequently slip through the semi-permeable boundaries laboured over by previous generations of medievalists, boundaries that demarcate orality and literacy; ‘literary’ and ‘historical’; ‘religious’ and ‘secular’; pre- and post-Conquest compositions, or ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ attitudes and writings. Once texts are regarded as offering indices of community- or self-definition, or models of piety and good behaviour (and the codices holding them statements of prestige and influence), the book historian is left to contemplate the real or imagined importance and status of books and writing within the larger socio-political, often local, milieux in which they were once produced and read.

Le réveil est brutal. L’Europe somnolait sur son passé et sur ce qu’elle croyait acquis à tout jamais. Voilà que lui revient en boomerang une affaire qu’elle croyait avoir réglée une fois pour toutes, depuis les temps, ô combien lointains! de la bataille de Poitiers et ceux, plus récents, de la bataille de Lépante à laquelle elle associait toujours le nom de Cervantès.

L’Islam est de nouveau présent, non plus du fait de la conquête militaire mais de l’arrivée par vagues successives d’une population musulmane qui s’installe. Notre société, jusqu’à maintenant, n’avait pas pris tellement en compte cette situation.

Les problèmes sont là et se feront chaque année, plus compliqués, plus ardus à résoudre.

Au durcissement de la foi de certaines couches de la population musulmane répond une douce tiédeur de nos croyances chrétiennes ancestrales que nous sommes même parfois honteux de reconnaître.

Que faire, sinon reprendre notre histoire, étudier les relations culturelles qui se sont établies entre chrétiens et musulmans dès le Moyen Âge.

Notre propos aujourd’hui est de revenir aux sources des religions chrétienne et musulmane et de reprendre les discussions théologiques et philosophiques qui ont eu lieu dès le Moyen Âge.

Quels sont les points où il y a divergence fondamentale entre chrétiens et musulmans?

“The most important part of the title of this book is the word ‘and’.” These words form the memorable conclusion to D.H. Green’s study Medieval Listening and Reading, they encapsulate how, in the Middle Ages, orality and literacy are not to be considered as two separate and largely unrelated cultures or modes of textual transmission, but as elements in a mutual interplay and interpenetration. In this volume, scholars from Britain, Germany and North America follow Green’s insistence on the conjunction of medieval orality and literacy, and show how this approach can open up new areas for investigation as well as help to reformulate old problems. The languages and literatures covered include English, Latin, French, Occitan and German, and the essays span the whole of the period from the early Middle Ages through to the fifteenth century.

Il presente volume raccoglie i contributi d’un Congresso Internazionale su Raimondo Lullo e Niccolò Cusano, svoltosi dal 25 al 27 novembre 2004 a Bressanone e Bolzano (Alto Adige/Sudtirolo).

Gli articoli, quattordici in tutto, indagano, sotto il profilo storico e sistematico, il perdurevole influsso esercitato dallo studioso maiorchino Raimondo Lullo sui diversi ambiti del pensiero del vescovo di Bressanone, nella cui biblioteca a Kues nessun altro autore è rappresentato con tale frequenza come Lullo. In particolare viene dato ampio spazio all’analisi critica dei modelli di dialogo interreligioso sviluppati da entrambi i pensatori.

Der vorliegende Band versammelt die Beiträge eines Internationalen Kongresses zu Ramon Llull und Nikolaus von Kues, der vom 25.-27. November 2004 in Brixen und Bozen (Südtirol) stattfand.

Die insgesamt vierzehn Beiträge untersuchen den nachhaltigen Einfluß des mallorquinischen Gelehrten auf den Brixner Bischof — in dessen Kueser Bibliothek kein anderer Autor so häufig vertreten ist wie Lullus — in historischer und systematischer Absicht für die verschiedenen Bereiche des cusanischen Denkens. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der kritischen Würdigung der Modelle, die beide Denker für das Gespräch zwischen den Religionen entwickeln.

Ludo Milis graduated from Ghent University in 1961 as the last student of François-Louis Ganshof, who in the years after Henri Pirenne’s retirement was the most prominent representative of the famous “Ghent School” of medieval history. Milis’s own academic career at Ghent span four decades in which he followed in the footsteps of his masters, yet also explored new directions. Like his predecessors, Milis always attached great importance to the critical examination of primary sources, but for him, such work must serve broader historical inquiry guided by a precise set of questions and methodological rigor. His interests lay primarily in the study of religious and cultural history, which previously had been neglected at Ghent; he was also a pioneer in the history of mentalities in the Low Countries. Milis’s research and thought found expression in several books, among which his Angelic Monks and Earthly men. Monasticism and its Meaning to Medieval Society (Boydell, 1992), translated into many languages, was probably the most influential.

This collection contains eleven essays published between 1969 and 1990. Most of them appeared in Dutch or French and have now been translated into English; two essays previously published in English were newly edited. All provide unique insight in the major themes of Milis’s work: the religious history of the Low Countries during the early and high Middle Ages, as well as the problem of religious conversion and persuasion; the rise of regular canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (also the subject of his doctoral dissertation on the order of Arrouaise, published in 1969); the uses of power and ideology; and the history of French Flanders. All bear witness to Milis’s inspiring ability to ask original, probing questions and to write historical syntheses accessible to a wide audience.

The collection is presented to Ludo Milis by his students on the occasion of his retirement and his sixty-fifth birthday.

This collection of essays by Australian scholars offers a wealth of contemporary perspectives on cultural communication amongst men and women in late medieval and early modern Europe. Essays dealing with Florence and Venice, with Rome, Lucca, Ferrara, and Bologna, as well as with Germany, England, and Lorraine, draw attention to the array of cultural expressions which competed for space and influence across European societies of the period.

These rich studies demonstrate the vitality of cultural production during a period of rapid and often violent transition. Variously focused on formal religious rites, on painting, sculpture, and woodcuts, on sermons, poetry, and letters, the contributors pursue cultural meaning as a matter of social identity and social context - as a performance that can be shown to affirm and also exclude particular topical values. Rituals, Images, and Words highlights the complex and subtle power of rhetorical forms in the history and historiography of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Over the past eighteen years, gender has become a major analytical tool in medieval studies. The purpose of this volume is to evaluate its use and to search for ways in which to improve and enhance its value. The authors address the question of how gender relates to other tools of medieval research. Several articles criticize the way in which an exclusive focus on gender tends to obscure the impact of other factors, for instance class, politics, economy, or the genre in which a source is written. Other articles address ‘wrong’ ways of using gender, for instance monolithic or anachronistic views of what constitutes differences between men and women. The intention is that this selection of case studies further establishes and enhances the indispensability of gender as an analytical tool within medieval studies.

The volume has been produced in recognition of the work of the Groningen medievalist, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday. She is the person primarily responsible for introducing to the Netherlands gender as a legitimate and useful tool in medieval studies. The contributors are medievalists from a range of countries and different backgrounds. They were selected in order to test Dr Mulder-Bakker’s ideas on methodology and interdisciplinarity through a series of case-studies.

Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale reflects and develops Anne Hudson’s pioneering work in textual criticism and religious controversy from the late medieval period to the Reformation. Written by newly emergent as well as internationally recognised scholars, the volume explores the wide spectrum of religious thought and practices between c. 1360 and c. 1560. Many essays, following the methodology of Anne Hudson’s scholarship, engage in the close study of manuscripts and archival holdings, disclosing new material and offering significant re-evaluation of documentary evidence and neglected texts. At a time of urgent calls for the reform of the Church, both in Britain and in mainland Europe, the voices of heresy can not always be distinguished from those of orthodox critics. Anne Hudson’s coinage of the term ‘grey area’ to describe the indeterminate boundary between radical orthodoxy and heterodoxy provides the lead for investigations into theological debate, devotional habits, and censorship. The volume significantly redefines our understanding of texts, history, and controversies from Wyclif to Bale.

Le colloque «Duns Scot à Paris, 1302-2002» (2-4 septembre 2002) a commémoré le sept centième anniversaire de l’arrivée, à l’Université de Paris, de Jean Duns Scot, l’une des rares dates connues dans la vie du plus grand philosophe et théologien du tournant des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Il a permis de faire le point des dernières découvertes historiques et philologiques, et de donner un état des recherches scotistes en cours, qui ont connu un essor rapide et même inattendu ces dernières années. Après une introduction de caractère historique (‘Paris, 1302’), l’on trouvera dans ce volume une succession d’études portant sur la logique, l’épistémologie et la sémantique (2e partie), la métaphysique (3e partie), l’éthique et la psychologie (4e partie), la théologie (5e partie). La sixième partie enfin (‘Paris 2002’) compare les contributions de Duns Scot aux réflexions contemporaines (sur le temps, autrui, le langage). Cet volume est un instantané des travaux les plus récents: à la fois un bilan des connaissances sur la fin du XIIIe siècle, une série d’interprétations originales et une somme d’analyses philosophiques.

Gérer les finances des princes et des villes est devenu à la fin du moyen âge l’affaire de professionnels de l’argent et de ses techniques. Ces hommes dont les employeurs requièrent compétence et loyauté appartiennent au monde en pleine ascension des officiers, des «fonctionnaires». Les nécessités de la guerre et de la paix, les coûts des armées et de la diplomatie, l’entretien et le fonctionnement des rouages du gouvernement et de l’administration, les aléas et les pressions de la situation économique, tout cela donne un sens à leur travail et requiert leur vigilante attention.

Accroître des moyens matériels, par des expédients ou des réformes durables, rendre plus performants des outils de gestion, voilà des objectifs qui peuplent ces pages, à travers plus d’un siècle et demi du passé des anciens Pays-Bas. Les études publiées regorgent ainsi d’apports nouveaux pour l’histoire de l’impôt, de l’emprunt, des rentes, du crédit et du commerce de l’argent. Elles éclairent aussi une face essentielle des relations entre gouvernants et gouvernés, dictées par des recettes et dépenses mais en même temps orientées par ceux qui y pourvoient et en font carrière.

Si l’action du cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher († 1263) a parfois suscité l’intérêt des historiens, il s’agit ici du premier ouvrage concernant l’œuvre de cet auteur, dont la place est pourtant capitale dans l’évolution de la pensée en Occident chrétien au xiii e siècle. Ce maître dominicain de la deuxième génération assimile le brillant héritage du xii e siècle et prépare l’essor qui va suivre dans le domaine des études bibliques et de la théologie, avec le développement de l’enseignement universitaire. Les différents aspects de son œuvre sont examinés dans ce volume, qui réunit les spécialistes de l’histoire intellectuelle du xiii e siècle. Le commentaire biblique de Hugues, ou Postille, imprimé jusqu’au xviii e siècle, a connu une fortune étonnante; il est, tout comme les concordances et le correctoire biblique diffusés sous son nom, le résultat d’un travail collectif, dirigé par le maître lors de son séjour parisien au couvent de Saint-Jacques. L’œuvre théologique, comportant le premier véritable commentaire des Sentences et de nombreuses quaestiones, aborde les problèmes de fond de la pensée chrétienne comme des aspects plus pratiques. Le point est fait également sur ses sermons, moins connus mais dont le rôle a été important. Ainsi, cet ouvrage, issu d’un colloque international tenu à Paris en mars 2000, apporte-t-il une contribution majeure à l’histoire de la pensée dans la première moitié du xiii e siècle.

Fréquenté par des étudiants venus de tous les pays, recrutant des maîtres eux-mêmes d’origines diverses, le studium de Montpellier s’est imposé dès le xiii e siècle comme l’un des grands centres européens des études médicales, formant des praticiens compétents, assurés, après y avoir conquis leurs grades, d’accomplir des carrières brillantes, du moins pour la plupart d’entre eux, fondées sur le prestige intellectuel, la considération sociale et l’aisance financière.

Dès le xiii e siècle, l’Université de médecine a été dotée de statuts. Elle a pu dès lors développer la formation des futurs praticiens sur des bases institutionnelles solides, attirant vers elle des professeurs renommés, tels Bernard de Gordon, Gérard de Solo, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Guy de Chauliac, Jean de Tournemire.

L’élaboration du savoir médical, outre le recours classique aux auctoritates antiques et arabes, s’est également souciée d’intégrer, à Montpellier, l’apport des disciplines voisines, telles la chirurgie et l’astrologie. Parmi les pathologies, les maladies de l’œil et la lèpre ont fait l’objet d’une attention particulière, tandis que les thérapeutiques, mettant en œuvre notamment les régimes de santé et intégrant la médecine montpelliéraine dans le cadre des pratiques universelles, ont pu harmonieusement combiner l’expérience et la réflexion savante. Forte de sa renommée et du rayonnement de son enseignement, la médecine montpelliéraine a ainsi construit une pensée dont les manuscrits conservés témoignent de la diffusion et illustrent l’influence que Montpellier, en ce domaine comme en d’autres, a exercée en Europe à la fin du Moyen Age.

Scholars of medieval literary and cultural history have grown more aware of the crucial role of memory in the production, reception and functioning of texts and manuscripts. We owe this to the pioneering studies of Frances Yates and, more recently, Mary Carruthers and Susan Hagen.

Historical linguists for their part try to describe the linguistic means by which listeners and readers are enabled to store the information flow in their memories.

The relationship between medieval texts and memory is at the centre of this book. Seven historians of literature, three linguists and one art historian have contributed eleven essays, subsumed under three sections. The first section, ‘Memory Texts’, discusses genres that belong to medieval mnemonics. In the second and most extensive section, ‘Memory Aspects in Texts’, the focus is on literature and, more particularly, on how attention for mnemonics can enhance our insight into the form, composition and functioning of literary texts and manuscripts. Mental and visual images play a central role here. ‘Text Memory’, the final section, analyses medieval (French) literary discourse as a fabric of reference chains, in which different grammatical markers generate and organise mental representations in the memory.

Les précédents colloques des Rencontres médiévales européennes ont renouvelé notre connaissance des origines de l’architecture gothique en mettant en évidence les liens qui existent entre le propos de Suger, tel qu’il a pris corps à Saint-Denis, et les nouveaux courants spirituels du xii e siècle. Les études réunies dans le présent volume prolongent cette enquête. Elles rappellent en particulier le rôle important joué par l’évêque de Paris, Maurice de Sully. Proche des Victorins, attentif aux directives réformatrices de la papauté, il fonde sa pastorale sur un renouveau liturgique dont l’exigence théologique n’est jamais exclue. C’est à lui, par exemple, que l’on doit la pratique de l’ostension de l’hostie. On trouvera ici le portrait de cet évêque exceptionnel ainsi que l’analyse de son grand dessein: la reconstruction de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. Cette entreprise fut accompagnée d’une renaissance artistique perceptible notamment dans le domaine musical. En arrière-plan, on retrouve l’abbaye de Saint-Victor, dont on a tenté d’évaluer l’influence dans la vie spirituelle du temps. L’œuvre de Godefroid, auteur d’un Microcosme, illustre bien ce milieu si original. Notre époque traversée de révolutions et d’incertitudes peut encore tirer des leçons du manifeste que fut en son temps Notre-Dame de Paris.

It is not surprising that the development of the internet and related electronic technologies has coincided with an academic interest in the history of reading. Using and transmitting texts in new ways, scholars have become increasingly aware of the precise ways in which manuscripts and printed books transmitted texts to early modern readers. This volume collects nine essays on reading and literacy in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Topics include: the function of marginalia in vernacular medieval manuscripts; the trope of reading in the fourteenth century; the definition of literacy in early modern England; marginalia and reading practices in early modern Italy; revision of medieval texts in the Renaissance; the prevalence of translated French poetry in sixteenth-century England; the use of poems as props in the plays of Shakespeare; the private reading of the playscripts of masques; and early-modern women’s reading practices. These essays demonstrate the energy and excitement of the rapidly developing field of the history of reading. They will appeal to those interested in European cultural history, the transition from manuscript to print culture, the history of literacy, and the history of the book.

This volume examines the various forms of contact between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe from 800 to 1350. It consists of twenty-five papers from international scholars specialising in archaeology, onomastics, literature, art history, epigraphy, religious history and linguistics. The volume is innovative in three respects: (i) in transcending conventional historical boundaries, by bringing together work on both the viking and medieval periods; (ii) by examining the ways in which mainland Europe influenced Scandinavia (e.g. kingship, law and social organization; and classical and continental literary traditions); and (iii) by synthesising all the material for an English-language readership for the first time. The broader timespan of investigation illustrates the changing nature of contact and the gradual integration of Scandinavia into European society: by 1350 Scandinavia was no longer a heathen outpost on the periphery of the known world, but an integral part of Western Christendom. The cultural impact of mainland Europe on Scandinavia, frequently mediated through religious channels, although less dramatic, is shown to have had a more significant long-term impact than the earlier viking raids. The volume is structured around the following sections: Historical and Archaeological Evidence for [Scandinavian] Contact with the British Isles; Evidence for the Linguistic Impact of Scandinavian Settlement; Evidence for the Impact of Christianity on Scandinavia; and Textual Evidence for Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence.

The medieval sermon provides the focus for the first volume of Disputatio because it often expresses the concerns of various intellectual milieux, such as the university, Church or court, and attempts to convey those concerns to other parts of medieval society.

Speculum Sermonis is an anthology of essays about medieval sermons in the Christian East and West. It aims to reveal precisely how sermons inform different disciplines (for instance, social and Church history, literature, musicology) and how the methodologies of different disciplines inform sermons. Sermons can, for instance, provide evidence for a reconstruction of medieval liturgy; reciprocally, the field of liturgiology investigates sermons as one aspect of Church performance. The volume’s title image of the mirror and the reference to medieval specula convey the idea of multiple reflections: the sermons’ on culture and the disciplines’ on sermons. Because the contributors to Speculum Sermonis come from a variety of fields, the essays here collectively provide a rich historical and contemporary academic context for reading the medieval sermon.

In addition to essays from across the fields, a number of which establish conclusions transcending disciplinary boundaries, Speculum Sermonis includes an introduction defending interdisciplinary study of sermons and an authoritative bibliography covering both primary and secondary resources for medieval sermons. A unique feature of the volume is the inclusion of response papers to the essays in each of the sections, in the spirit of the book series title Disputatio.

Compared with most of mainland Europe north of the Alps, the introduction of writing in East Central Europe (Bohemia, Poland and Hungary) took place with a considerable delay. Much is known about East Central European uses of writing, although only a fragment of this knowledge is known outside the region. Gathered by historians, palaeographers and codicologists, diplomatists, art historians, literary historians and others, this knowledge has hardly ever been studied in the light of recent discussions on medieval literacy and communication. Work done in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian traditions of scholarship has never been subjected to a comparative analysis. Furthermore, the question of the relation between writing and other forms of communication in the region remains largely unexplored. The volume serves a double purpose. For the first time, a collection of contributions on medieval literacy in East Central Europe is put before the forum of international scholarship. It is also hoped to further discussions of modes of communication, literate behaviour and mentalities among scholars working in the region.

This book aims to collect and present the results of research done within the context of the project ‘The voice of silence / La voz del silencio: An interdisciplinary research project about literate women and women authors in the West-European late Middle Ages from a gender perspective (11th to 15th centuries)’. The project was a bilateral research project, with participants of the University of Chile in Santiago on the one hand and the Universities of Gent and Antwerpen on the other. Medieval scholars, literary historians and literary theorists joined forces. The angle from which the material was being studied, however, was always the same: gender being the central issue. The project focused on women as participants in late medieval society and culture of the Rhineland and the Low Countries. Indeed, all the researchers involved acquired their expertise in this field and/or the field of women’s literacy.

Several members of this Flemish-Chilean project have contributed an essay to this book, but supplemented by guest authors. The guests are internationally renowned scholars reflecting an expertise in gender studies or in an aspect not covered by the team members of the project. Their contributions complete the research results of the project.

The story told in this book is focused on literate women and gender. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the voices of women authors, many of them religious and mystics, resounded in a literate society dominated by clerics. Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch, two of the most famous representatives of this ‘female voice’ are highlighted in Part I. These women were the forerunners of a new reading culture among (semi-)religious and even lay women in which the use of the vernacular was a decisive factor (Part II). Yet, from the thirteenth century onwards, and with increasing intensity towards the end of the Middle Ages, men once more tried to get a grip on women’s reading and writing. Aspects of these attemps are illustrated in part III.