EMISCA

This volume explores the Viking Age colonization and exploration of the North Atlantic, from Arctic Norway to Vinland in eastern North America. Its contributors, predominately archaeologists by training, bring new evidence and an interdisciplinary perspective to a subject often dominated by sources of variable historicity. They explore the creation and transformation of ethnicity in new lands - some occupied, others empty. They also address the historiography of Norse Landnám, unravelling the processes by which scholarly interpretations of the Viking Age have been created. The result illuminates the consequences of migration in the early Middle Ages and the interplay of local and large-scale socio-economic processes. In concluding, the volume assesses the relationship between Norse expansion and later European ‘rediscovery’ of the New World.

This versatile collection of essays sets out to underline the new visual agenda in today’s research into history and the history of art. The impact of alternative imagery, of image databases and of computer-generated material has effectively revealed a separate resource-category, offering further definitions of meaning and information and requiring new methodologies of interpretation. The volume’s subtitle, ‘Towards a New Iconology’, makes the point that our conventional approaches towards the image may no longer be adequate. Its nineteen contributions all represent a moving-away from the tradition passed down ever since Gregory the Great famously pronounced images to be the Bible of the illiterate. On the contrary, the authors of this volume demonstrate that images constitute another world altogether, with its own ideology and store of information, and with its own emotional charge and seductive qualities. History and Images contains articles by eminent scholars from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and USA.

How did people know what they knew, and learn what they learnt? As Derek Pearsall’s introduction makes clear this is the primary focus of the collection of essays published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

The learning materials included range from grammar books to mystery plays, and from court records to monastic chronicles, as well as liturgical and devotional texts. But the essays are not only concerned with texts alone, but with the broader and often fluid social environments in which learning took place. Many of the papers therefore question the validity of some distinctions habitually used in the discussion of medieval culture, such as the opposition between orality and literacy, between Latin and the vernacular or between secular and religious.

This volume addresses the current fashion for research on the family and domesticity in the past. It draws together work from various disciplines - historical, art-historical, and literary - with their very different source materials and from a broad geographical area, including some countries - such as Croatia and Poland - which are not usually considered in standard textbooks on the medieval family. This volume considers the various affective relationships within and around the family and the manner in which those relationships were regulated and ritualized in more public arenas. Despite their disparate approaches and geographical spread, these essays share many thematic concerns; the ideologies which structured gender roles, inheritance rights, incest law and the ethics of domestic violence, for example, are all considered here. This collection originates from the Leeds IMC in 2001 when the special strand was entitled ‘Domus and Familia’ and attracted huge participation. This book aims to reflect that richness and variety whilst contributing to an expanding area of historical enquiry.

Assembly is a central feature of the European political process between the demise of the Roman Empire and the rise of the bureaucratic state in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Historians have often neglected the crucial rule of political assemblies in their own right, concentrating instead on exceptional or extraordinary attention-catching events which occurred at assemblies. Earlier generations of scholars tried to discern in such assemblies the forerunners of later medieval parliaments and other forms of representative government. By contrast, the contributors to this volume present medieval assemblies in their own terms.

Were political assemblies in the earlier Middle Ages convened to confirm decisions already taken elsewhere or were they genuinely deliberative? How, if at all, did political assemblies create consensus? At what level(s) of the political and administrative hierarchy were assemblies held, who attended such gatherings, how were they conducted, and where were they held? The main focus is on assemblies of emperors, kings, and princes, and on those of townsfolk, though some more local assemblies are also discussed. The over-arching thematic structure relates to the purposes of assemblies and how they worked, their practical and ritual or symbolic aspects, and the degree to which they were stage-managed, and by whom. The contributors bring archaeological, as well as historical, evidence to bear and present a range of geographical, political and historiographical approaches and traditions.

The essays in this volume, presented in honour of John O. Ward, explore the role of rhetoric in promoting reform and renewal in the Latin West from Peter Abelard (1079-1142) to Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). Ward, who has taught for many years at the University of Sydney, has been an influential and creative force in medieval and renaissance studies both in Australia and internationally. This volume opens with a personal memoir and bibliography of Ward’s publications, as well as an overview of the study of medieval rhetoric. The first of the three sections, ‘Abelard and Rhetoric’, relates Abelard’s rhetoric to his logic, his theology, and his relationship to Heloise. A second section, ‘Voices of Reform’, considers various writers (William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, Richard FitzNigel, and William of Ockham) who bring rhetorical techniques to bear upon analysis of social conditions. A third section, ‘Rhetoric in Transition’, deals with the evolution of rhetorical theory between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The volume will be of interest not just to specialists in rhetoric, but to all concerned with issues of reform and renewal in European culture during the period 1100-1540.

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble households were defined as agents of government in the administration of local communities. Many of the papers therefore address the public functions and perceptions of the household, and argue that the formulation of domestic (or family) values was of essential importance in the growth and development of the medieval Christian state.

Contributors to this volume of collected essays write from a number of disciplinary perspectives (archaeological, art-historical, historical and literary). They examine socially diverse households (from peasants to kings) and use case studies from different regions across Europe in different periods within the medieval epoch from c. 850 to c. 1550. The volume both includes studies from archives and collections not often covered in English-language publications, and offers new approaches to more familiar material. It is divided into thematic sections exploring the role of households in the exercise of power, in controlling the body, in the distribution of wealth and within a wider economy of possessions.

El interés que los autores de estos trabajos demuestran por las complejidades y consecuencias de la traducción en la Edad Media, o de la traducción de textos medievales en el período moderno, ha dado como resultado un volumen diverso y estimulante intelectualmente. Los trabajos del presente volumen, escritos en inglés, francés y español, se centran en el tema de la traducción desde muchas perspectivas, ofreciendo una amplia gama de interpretaciones del concepto de traducción. El volumen contiene trabajos que abarcan en el tiempo desde el período Anglo-Sajón hasta el presente, y en temática desde libros de recetas medievales hasta argumentos a favor de que las mujeres administren la Eucaristía. Las lenguas que se estudian incluyen no sólo lenguas no europeas sino también el Latín y numerosas vernáculas europeas, ya sean como lengua origen o lengua meta. Como cualquier traductor o estudioso de la traducción puede rápidamente constatar, es imposible separar lengua de cultura. Todos los autores de este volumen han analizado en profundidad las complejidades de la traducción como hecho cultural, aún cuando el foco de atención pareciera ser específicamente lingüístico. Son estas complejidades las que dotan al estudio de la teoría y práctica de la traducción en la Edad Media de su perdurable fascinación.

The interest of the writers of these essays in the intricacies and implications of translation in the Middle Ages, or of the translation of medieval texts in the modern period, has resulted in a diverse and intellectually stimulating volume. The papers in this volume, written in either English, French, or Spanish, approach translation from a wide variety of perspectives and offer a range of interpretations of the concept of translation. The volume contains essays ranging in time from the Anglo Saxon period to the present, and in topic from medieval recipe books to arguments in favour of women administering the sacrament. Languages studied include non-European languages as well as Latin and numerous European vernaculars as both source and target languages. As any translator or student of translation quickly becomes aware, it is impossible to divorce language from culture. All the contributors to this volume struggle with the complexities of translation as a cultural act, even when the focus would seem to be specifically linguistic. It is these complexities which lend the study of the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages its enduring fascination.

Complexité et fascination: deux mots qui reviennent souvent à l’esprit au contact des textes médiévaux, au point qu’ils pourraient servir à caractériser la nature des rapports qui unissent ces textes à leurs traducteurs. Dans leur diversité, les communications entendues à Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle illustrent, chacune à sa manière, de nombreux aspects de cette complexité, qu’il s’agisse des sujets traités ou des problèmes techniques soulevés. Le rapport au temps qu’impose le texte médiéval se double d’un rapport à la distance, car la différence culturelle se présente au traducteur comme un éloignement, ce qui, dans le travail de rapprochement que constitue alors la traduction, introduit la notion d’interprétation. A son tour cette interprétation, avec ses degrés, est étroitement dépendante des objectifs pédagogiques, culturels, politiques ou religieux que s’est fixés le traducteur, comme cela apparaîtra clairement à la lecture d’un certain nombre de ces communications. Plusieurs études de ce recueil confirment également que la traduction, loin d’être un travail de solitaire, est avant tout un acte social, une activité de mise en relations. C’est cette patiente recherche d’adaptation à des publics différents, en fonction d’époques et de goûts différents, accompagnée de choix tour à tour réjouissants et frustrants, qui constitue le travail de tout traducteur, qu’il appartienne au Moyen Âge ou au monde moderne. C’est aussi cette richesse, venue du passé mais toujours actuelle, et cette recherche sans cesse reprise d’un équilibre toujours instable, qui font que la traduction, dans sa pratique comme dans sa théorie, exerce sur tant d’esprits une réelle fascination.

This volume is composed of selected papers from the main strand ‘Time and Eternity’ at the seventh International Medieval Congress held in July 2000. It attests to the fact that the medieval experience of time and eternity was rich and complex, and that its investigation is open to various approaches and methods. Time and (the possibility or impossibility of) its beginning and its end were frontiers to be explored and to be understood.

To make the reader more familiar with the field of study, the volume begins with Wesley Stevens’s plenary address ‘A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?’, a stimulating introduction not only with regard to some of the basic problems in conceptualizing the nature of time but also to the dating of historical events and the use of calendars for that purpose.

Following Stevens’s essay, the volume is organised into seven broader themes covering a variety of questions and trying to offer new insights into the medieval perception and constructions of time. They deal with the computation of time and the use of calendars; Jewish concepts of time and redemption; Christian philosophies of eternity and time; monastic and clerical conceptions; literary representations; time and art; and apocalyptic expectations. The volume’s selection of authors is international in scope and represents some of the leading current scholarship in the field. It proves that we still ‘thirst to know the power and the nature of time’ (St Augustine).

In the modern world, interest in religious devotion is as great as ever. This volume brings together the research of ten scholars into the diverse ways that Europeans expressed their quest for God over more than a millennium, from the formative centuries of Christianity up to the seventeenth century. Topics include women transvestite saints, Monophysite wall-paintings, Anglo-Saxon sainthood and painful martyrdom, Carmelite self-redefinition, the confident authorship of Gautier de Coinci and Matfre Ermengaud, competition between the bishop and a wandering preacher for popular favor in Le Mans, the contemplative philanthropies of the Poor Clares, Chester Nativity-cycle actors’ masculinity, Jean Gerson’s warm relations with his siblings, and George Herbert’s Eucharistic feeling. The authors’ profound familiarity with primary sources as well as the influence of current theory makes these essays vibrant and timely.

Historien de la philosophie et de la théologie du Moyen Âge tardif, spécialiste des xiv e et xv e siècles, Zénon Kaluza a profondément marqué les études médiévales des dernières décennies. Ses travaux portent sur plusieurs grands thèmes de l’histoire doctrinale du Moyen Âge, notamment le «platonisme» parisien et pragois, les méthodes et les langages de la philosophie et de la théologie, les contextes institutionnels du savoir et, enfin, la question du rapport entre l’Église et l’État. Pour rendre hommage à l’homme et à son œuvre, ses collègues et amis lui offrent ce recueil d’articles. Réunies sous le titre de Chemins de la pensée médiévale, ces études explorent différents aspects de l’histoire de la philosophie et de la théologie ainsi que, dans une perspective plus large, de l’histoire intellectuelle et sociale du Moyen Âge. Par l’ampleur de son orientation thématique, le présent volume offre une excellente présentation de l’état actuel de la recherche sur la pensée médiévale.

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear.

The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic.

Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.

The practice of commentary upon authoritative texts is a prominent and fundamental feature of all teaching and learning during the Middle Ages. The roots of medieval commentaries made upon important philosophical texts lay in antiquity, but commentaries upon such texts — both ancient and more recent — flourished as never before during the late Middle Ages. Subsequently, beyond the end of the Middle Ages, the appeal and the habit of commentary declined, and to the point that today a considerable effort is required to understand medieval commentaries — their genres, their techniques, their evolution, their extraordinary persistence in use over many centuries — and perhaps too to understand the much diminished importance of the practice of commentary on select texts in current academic scholarship. The Philosophical Commentary in the Latin West (XIII-XV Centuries) proved to be a rich, varied and seemingly inexhaustible theme for the Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy. The contributors who were invited discussed commentaries on texts of medicine, alchemy, biology, psychology, physics, ethics and politics as well as theology. The medieval commentators themselves were Arabs and Jews as well as Christians.

Depuis plus d’un demi-siècle, les historiens et les sociologues se sont beaucoup intéressés aux courants de pensée et aux mouvements qui, au cours des siècles, ont lié l’aspiration à un ordre social plus juste ou à une réforme religieuse à l’avènement d’une ère nouvelle, placée sous le signe de la perfection et de la paix, qui durerait jusqu’à la fin des temps. On a longtemps considéré ces phénomènes comme des formes de fanatisme ou comme une expression “pré-politique” de la lutte des classes. Sans négliger ces facteurs, le présent volume vise à fournir une interprétation équilibrée et à jour de ces formes radicales d’attente et d’espoir d’un changement, qui n’ont rien perdu de leur actualité.

Le présent Colloque, organisé par les Rencontres médiévales européennes, tend d’abord, ici comme dans d’autres recherches analogues qui ont déjà intéressé la même association, à mettre en lumière, par une démarche pluridisciplinaire, certains aspects de la culture médiévale qui manifestent à la fois sa complexité, sa profondeur et sa beauté. Il s’agit ici de la parole et de la beauté où s’accordent et s’unissent l’art littéraire et la sagesse, philosophique et même théologique.

Il est en effet possible de répondre aujourd’hui à certaines objections qui s’adressent communément au Moyen Âge lui-même et plus largement aux formes d’expression qu’il met en lumière. On lui reproche à la fois d’avoir abusé de la rhétorique et de l’avoir méconnue. Mais les chercheurs savent depuis quelques années que la rhétorique ne se réduit ni à l’abstraction scolastique ni à la sophistique. Dans la forme qu’elle prend jusqu’au xiv e siècle, en se référant à l’Antiquité et en préparant plus qu’on ne croit la Renaissance, elle suscite et reconnaît le progrès du langage, de sa justesse et de ses grâces. Pour cela, elle s’appuie à la fois sur la beauté de l’idéal et sur la rigueur de la pensée, sur la transcendance platonicienne et sur le bon-sens aristotélicien combiné avec l’étendue du savoir. Elle s’accorde aussi avec la poétique, latine ou profane, simplement lyrique, ou tournée vers la liturgie. Nous savons encore aujourd’hui que l’usage positif de l’intelligence peut s’associer avec la naïveté mystique dans un divino-humanisme.

Nous avons voulu montrer dans la tradition qui mène jusqu’à la modernité cette présence constante du coeur: dans la parole la plus fine chacun peut trouver l’amour le plus pur.

Amnon Linder, professor of medieval history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has published seminal studies in the history of the Christian Holy Land and in Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In recent years he has dedicated himself to the study of medieval liturgy, particularly Crusader liturgy of the liberation and destruction of Jerusalem (forthcoming as the next volume in this series).

The essays gathered here from friends, colleagues and students of Prof. Linder pick up the themes of his publications — medieval law, liturgy and literature. The papers deal with a variety of sources, encompass the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and span from the Holy Land to the British Isles.

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.