Viator (English and Multilingual Edition)

The textual description of a mappa mundi, preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript from northern Italy (Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale IV.D.21), presents striking similarities with the two regional maps (Asia Minor and Palestine), erroneously assigned to Saint Jerome (British Library Addit. 10049, 12th c.). Two catalogues of the Bobbio library mention a liber I cosmographie (9th c.) and a “world map in Irish tradition and Lombard script [= pre-Caroline minuscule]” (1461). This article argues that the model is a mappa mundi made in Iona, Saint Columba’s foundation (565), perhaps during abbot Adomnán’s lifetime (d. 704), as the description contains a unique list of the Hebrides. Moreover, like the maps, the text refers to the Theban legion and the Desert Fathers’ Thebaid. These last subjects interested Eucherius of Lyon (5th c.). On that grounds the author presents the hypothesis that the ultimate model was elaborated by Eucherius or his circle or, at least, in an environment influenced by his exegesis methods.

The destruction brought about by the Germanic peoples while advancing into the Roman Empire did not diminish the significance of the ancient culture because, for the most part, the immigrants became acculturated. On the other hand the migrants wanted to protect their own characteristics, for example by conversion to non-Roman Christianity, thereby preventing total assimilation. Typically, cultural hybridizations resulted from an additive union of both elements. A cross-cultural interaction with real innovations became possible where the migrants did not have to fear for their identity. The best example of this is the Franks, who, during their advances through Gaul, did not give up the connections to their homeland and who, in sharp contrast to long distance migrations of other “gentes,” could expect a further influx of supporters from their homeland. It was not the migrating but the expanding “gentes” that played a crucial role in the origins of Europe. The limited importance of migrations becomes clear if one considers that one of the most important civilized peoples of developing Europe, the Irish, did not migrate and that the immense expansion of the Slavs throughout Eastern Europe was the result of expansion rather than by migration.

Plato’s criticism of Anaxagoras’s philosophy of mind is the milestone of Western Metaphysics. At least from Plato to Aquinas, the relationship of the mind to the Metaphysical Good can be regarded as a kind of hallmark of that milestone. According to Plato, Anaxagoras’s mistake lies in linking mind merely to physical goodness, as if it were a sort of management of natural things. In agreement with this, from Plato to Aquinas the concepts of reason and freedom have been deepened and enriched. The article specifically points out—from an Aristotelian point of view—that Anaxagoras’s original error is the confusion between mind (mens, noûs) and soul (anima, psyjé). The purpose of the article is programmatic rather than to deliver a thorough explanation of these issues.

The Notre-Dame chapel is a typical building of the monastic life at Cluny and the Ecclesia Cluniacensis, as well as the antechurch. The Notre-Dame chapel is directly connected to the chapter house and opened on it. It is of a major importance in the Cluniac liturgy: morning service, sunday and major feast processions, deathwatch, laying-out of bodies, etc. The construction of the Notre-Dame chapel, initially basic, can be complex in a certain way, as in the Marcigny or Polirone buildings. This complexity indicates the goals of the builders, who took their inspiration from late antique and Carolingian architecture.

This article reviews the place and the function of the epigraphic in Romanesque wall painting. Through a historiographical balance, we envisage at first the partial and limited treatment to which the historians of art have submitted the medieval inscription in the painted image and the numerous gaps in the definition of the status and the role of the monumental writing. The question of the manuscript titulus and its application in the decoration of the church shows how rich and complex were written practices in connection with images, and inserts the research on painted inscriptions in the field of the most recent works about relations between text and image. This large-scale research needs the support of numerous case studies; the analysis of inscriptions can that way take an essential position (through editing, restoring, and placing in archaeological and iconographic context) and enter into a broad reflection on medieval graphic practices. This article presents, in the form of prolegomena and methodological orientation, the major principles of this reflection.

Starting from the analysis of Bernard’s of Clairvaux work De praecepto et dispensatione, the article focuses on the ancient and medieval regulae vivendi in order to demonstrate that they represent a specific form of normativity, absolutely different from the classical roman jus and the medieval canon law. I analyze the peculiar way in which Bernard tried to describe the particular normative logic of the Rule of Benedict from the point of view of a western legal history of longue durée. In comparison with the civil law and the ecclesiastical legislation, a “rule of life” (regula vitae) is a special form of law which extends to the complete life of the individual, not a single moment. The juridical institution of the vow has an important place in this special normative logic.

Based on the complete reading of the Miracles de Nostre Dame (between 1214–1233), the first part of the article highlights the importance of images of the Virgin in personal piety and pastoral guidance of the Benedictine Gautier of Coinci. They appear inherent to Christianity and it is necessary to venerate them for saving the intercession of Mary. The study shows also how the author, but never formally, declines in various ways the relationship between image and prototype by the miracles that adapts and the messages he wants to convey. The second part explores the miraculous Marian stories of two collections strictly contemporary that of Gautier, the Dialogus Miraculorum and the Libri Miraculorum (I and II) of Cesaire of Heisterbach. It includes much attention to images of the Virgin, but with inflections due mainly to the different nature of the collections, to the choice to focus on contemporary miracles and to the membership of Cesaire to the Cistercian order. On the other hand, assertions of Gautier and Cesaire prove that, nor the clergy, the laity did not form a homogeneous group in their attitudes and beliefs relating to images and their miracles.

The article deals with the modalities of the transmission of arms in a selection of prose texts from the first half of the thirteenth century: two romances from the Lancelot-Graal cycle, the Suite Vulgate and the Queste del saint Graal, and a composite romance commonly known as Guiron le Courtois. The transmission of arms dramatizes the tensions which exist between different types of kinship; fiction makes these tensions its own and reinterprets them based on specific ideological determinations. Thus the various romances select which kind of tie they wish to express through the transmission of arms; in each text, arms circulate within the bounds of one particular sort of kinship, be it carnal (and either matrilineal or patrilineal) or elective. Furthermore, the way in which arms circulate establishes a distinction between knights who represent solely the order of the bellatores and knights who enjoy some attributes of the royal function.

This article is a “think piece” for counterfactual history. It claims that the mere (re)construction of the actual pattern of events is not sufficient to understand the whole setting of a historical situation, especially when history takes an unexpected turn. Historians need to consider alternative scenarios that appeared to the contemporaries as real options which were likely to take place, in order to analyze the ways in which historical structures and actors were interlinked. In this article, the interactions between the Dominican order and the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century are described as a “history of entanglements” (Shalini Randeria). The unforeseen coincidence of these two movements highlights the contingency factor of history and raises the question of other possible outcomes. By asking for alternative scenarios from three different angles, the author seeks to show the degree of entanglement between the Mendicant and the Mongol movement and to demonstrate the use of counterfactual thinking for dealing with contingency.

The sinfulness of dance stood as a cardinal concept of medieval morality, at least until its partial reevaluation within the context of courtly ceremony, and dancing was often related to the negative idea of self-exhibition. Preachers and Christian writers aimed their condemnations especially at show-women, since ostentation of the female body represented a diabolical incitement to the pleasures of the flesh and to lechery. Medieval imagery virtually opposed David’s holy dance to Salomé’s sinful exhibition before Herod. Since the reward of her dancing is Saint John’s decollation, the performance becomes twice as sinful and the miniatures showing Salome as a jongleresse reflect a significant superposition of subjects. Since the XIIIth century, preachers’ sermons described dance as a sinful entertainment and depicted performing women as instruments of the devil. Reflections of these concepts can also be found in medieval miniatures, especially in gothic manuscripts, where bodily transformation sometimes appears as a beastly degradation of dignity and a sign of moral perversion, while the mere presence of a woman can become an allusion to lust.

Dante Alighieri’s works contain definite universal motifs, based not only on their conceptualization of important truth, which concerns philosophical and rational issues, but also on their universal emphatic character. Dante defines a map of emotions, which, starting from personal experience, become exemplars valid for all his readers. This essay focuses on the way Dante deals with envy as an emotion and as one of the seven deadly sins. References to his relationship with the Florentine people and his experience of exile are frequent in the Divine Comedy. This article first analyzes how Dante represents envy as a real iconographic and allegoric figure in Purgatorio, Canto XIII. Then it focuses on two particular cases of envy which have different and opposite consequences (Piero Della Vigna in Inferno, Canto XIII, and Romeo of Villanova in Paradiso, Canto VI) and which can be clearly related to Dante’s autobiographical experience of the cause of his exile.

The article explores the historical-philosophical link between Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cues (Cusanus). This link is analysed as a revaluation of a condemned medieval tradition of thought offered by a cardinal during the Renaissance. The background of the relationship between Cusanus and Eckhart is the comparison between Thomism and mysticism in the late medieval and Renaissance development of Christianity. The article considers the scholastic philosopher Johannes Wenck’s criticism of Cusanus and his defense in the Apologia doctae ignorantiae, as an affirmation of Eckhart’s philosophical tradition against Aristotelian-Thomism orthodoxy. The article highlights the role of Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Bertold of Moosburg as intermediaries. Finally, it examines the question of how a cardinal was able to develop an heretical theory through his philosophy; a three-fold answer is offered.

Piero della Francesca did not fully apply the rules of perspectiva artificialis though he was aware of their significance. Piero’s choice was dictated by his own comprehension of both the science of vision and theoretical convictions emanating from Neo-Platonism that had exerted a great impact on him. But confirmation of his specific expression is really found in his work that negated chronological continuity with respect to figures bathing in an airless surrounding. In the scene depicting the encounter between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, the viewer must first take in the woman of Sheba standing in the foreground in order to understand the event and fully integrate its logic of communication. This represents an act of co-participation of paramount importance in the concept of unio between the divine and the human found in Neo-Platonism. Moreover, the reasons for Piero’s revival in the beginning of the twentieth century as well as his links to others artists can be understood in his intentional flattening of perspective through his use of specific colors.

This article analyzes the different ways that clandestine marriages were reproved in the writings of reformists and for what purposes. Medieval doctors had already demonstrated that a clandestine marriage was morally bad and canonically prohibited, even if they had had to recognize its validity to strengthen the consensualist theory of sacrament. In order to prove marriage was an honorable way to salvation for the laity, the theologian Jean Raulin argued that clandestine marriages were as devilish as adultery or fornication. Erasmus reproved the troubles that arose from the validity of marriages contracted without family consent or by having sex after betrothal. The two of them wanted to defend the marriage sacrament and reorder society. But Erasmus’s calling into question the sacramentality and indissolubility of clandestine marriages opened the way for Lutheran questioning of the scholastic theory of marriage: it is no sacrament but a civil contract, and parental approval is necessary to create it.

This article focuses on themes present in both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Alberti’s Momo; these subjects were widespread in Renaissance culture, but both authors use them in the same way. Was Shakespeare familiar with Alberti’s works? He may have been, if we consider the possible role of Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, a well-known author in Elizabethan England; his work in Ferrara concerned the circulation of Alberti’s thought. Furthermore, Alberti’s Opuscoli latini were well known in Europe in the sixteenth century, thanks to Cosimo Bartoli’s translation. Perhaps there is only a certain coincidence between Shakespeare and Alberti’s thought, but the same vocabulary is employed to describe, for instance, characters and their nature. This study is a sort of inlay, detecting points of agreement between Shakespeare and Alberti on important subjects such as mirrors, theatre, hiding, shadows, and court intrigues.

The notion of dignitas hominis is one of the most pervasive and long-lasting topoi in the traditional representation of the early Renaissance. In order to reconstruct the different strands of the debate about mankind in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, humanist and religious works on the “misery” of human condition also need to be taken into consideration. In these pages, a general overview on this subject is given, with a description of the key issues discussed in these texts and of their classical and Christian sources. Also, three humanist works (Leon Battista Alberti’s Theogenius, Poggio Bracciolini’s De miseria humanae conditionis, and Giannozzo Manetti’s Dialogus consolatorius) are compared and contrasted, especially from the viewpoint of the style, characters, and aims of these dialogues, so as to present three different approaches to the problem of human wretchedness and frailness.

Giordano Bruno’s art of memory moves away from the classical model consisting of places and images. The first change is in the use of places, whose structure has been linked to the logical form of memory data, so that the form of, i.e., a memory palace will be the same as that of a memorized book, so that the number and size of floors, rooms, and places correspond to its sections, chapters, and paragraphs. The second point is the introduction of Lull’s ars combinatoria as applied to the images. Thanks to this device it is possible to manipulate memory signs and manage their meanings. This happens by the use of subiectum adiectivum that helps increase the versatility of both places and images. The aim of these innovations is to make the fantastic world work like the external one, which produces beings by adding form to matter (or in fantasy, meanings to imagination) and perpetually changes everything in order to bring out all possibilities (its fantastic counterpart is the shift of meanings by their signs). The inner imaginative sphere will be so changed in a visual laboratory able to imitate nature, by offering a new method of refining knowledge and a tool for bringing man close to the divine core of nature through the experience of the whole and variable complexity of the infinite universe.