Viator (English and Multilingual Edition)

Computistical studies of the past centuries have primarily focused on the works of well-known individuals, while anonymous texts have been widely left unconsidered, leading to an immense overrating of the scientific achievements of the scholars known by name. Only within the past few years have the intellectual milieus that produced and influenced the known authors received some attention. This article defines on a textual basis Irish and Anglo-Saxon scientific milieus between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede by providing a survey of all known computistical works of this period. On this basis, the Irish scientific contribution to the Carolingian educational and intellectual renaissance is assessed before the more general desiderata in the modern study of early medieval computistica are outlined at the end of this paper.

The article proposes to read the “Vita Karoli” as an “egodocument” of its author Einhard. It argues that Einhard wrote his biography of Charlemagne during the winter of 828/29. His aim, however, was neither to criticize the emperor Louis the Pious nor to admonish him to alter his policy. Rather, Einhard intended to redefine his own position as a member of the political elites. By writing his “Vita Karoli” Einhard demonstrated not only his Ciceronian eloquence and wisdom, but drew parallels between himself and the aged Cicero. Henceforth, Einhard would give up his life as a courtier and live in leisure (otium) near his martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus at Seligenstadt. Nevertheless, he intended to be useful and salutary for his comtemporaries. Einhard’s first readers—the librarian Gerward and the young monk Lupus of Ferrières—interpreted the “Vita Karoli” in this way: They read the text as a monument of Einhard’s eloquency, wisdom, and greatness.

The translatio of Santiago played an important part in twelfth-century art. Although the text of the Gelmírez scriptorium was at first not mentioned, during the latter stages the translatio was repeatedly quoted in the Codex Calixtinus and, as we suggest, could have been part of the decorative cycles from the cathedral. The important hagiographical sources, the use of the scene in one of the earliest coins from Compostela, dating from the reign of Fernando II, and the dissemination of the iconography in the Mediterranean, appearing in the Basilica of San Crisogono in 1128, lend support to this hypothesis. The continuing archaeological digs, which were consistently performed in the city of Santiago de Compostela and other places associated with the pilgrimage, made way for the emergence of the Gelmírez coins, the iconography of which could help to establish the suggested interpretation.

Through the study of two Spanish works of the thirteenth century (the wooden ceiling of the Aragonese church of Santa María de Mediavilla, and the margins of the Vidal Mayor, a well-known legal manuscript preserved in the Getty Museum of Malibu), this study addresses a general question that has sparked numerous debates in recent times: the presence and meaning of ludic and profane imagery in sacred or other serious contexts. This issue is addressed from the perspective of what may be called—following Gombrich—the “primacy of artistic genres” in the modus operandi of artistic creation and reception in the Middle Ages, a principle which seems unavoidable when we want to establish the intended meaning of an image, or—as the article proposes—to distinguish between its generic (or topical) sense and its specific (or original) significance or significances.

Medieval knights and men-at-arms rode stallions into battle. This practice is best explained by the function of the warhorses as status symbols. As such warhorses could communicate their riders’ or owners’ status to society mainly for three reasons. They were expensive and thus exclusive. Warhorses were trained and bred especially for warfare and made their riders’ connection with warfare visible. Moreover stallion warhorses required considerable skill and training. Only those whose position guaranteed them time and wealth for extensive training were able to handle warhorses. For these reasons warhorses were understood as symbols of status, first and foremost for the elevation of status (Statuserhöhung) but also for its reduction (Statusminderung). It is this connection between value and type of horse and the status of its rider that made stallions more desirable for medieval knights than mares or geldings.

The image-reliquaries, whose singularity attracts our attention, are defined in their artistic and religious context as complex compositions. This article is about the paintings on wood panels (or, more rarely, on gilded glass) functioning as portable relics, decorated occasionally with precious or semi-precious stones. The diffusion of the model of the “picture-reliquary”—a single, diptych, or triptych panel comprising the portrait of the Virgin and Child set in a large framework encrusted with relics—was particularly widespread in Italy and subsequently in central Europe. However, the Polish reliquaries, known in the territory of Little Poland from the fifteenth century until the beginning of the sixteenth century, rarely receive art historical mention. They appear only sporadically in some articles, but they never yet have been the objects of a veritable study with regard to their iconographic contents, formal similarities, and devotional use. For this reason, this article links them to other medieval works of art and looks, from this perspective, at the continuity of such reliquaries after the Middle Ages.

While the political center of Egypt moved increasingly to Cairo, natural disasters (as earthquakes, droughts, and the plague), communal strife, pirate attacks, administrative reform, and economic change shattered Alexandria’s urban fabric in the late Middle Ages. The city intra muros resisted its decay tenaciously but eventually collapsed after its last important institution, the Venetian consulate, had moved to Cairo in the sixteenth century. However, Alexandria as a whole did not collapse. The neighborhood on the peninsula north of the walled city recovered from the ordeals: It grew thanks to a constant flow of immigrants, tax benefits, and the continued importance of the port. New port facilities, a new fortress, and Sufi-institutions (dating back to the thirteenth century) served as settlement cores supplying the necessary infrastructure. The peninsula became Alexandria’s new center, while the walled city decayed.

The example of Notre-Dame of Noyon illustrates the process of sanctuarization and, in its case, its adjustment to the liturgical and historical-religious evolutions of the building. Thus, the chevet was at first conceived according to a liturgy which provided a larger space to the Chapter, whose liturgical choir expanded into the nave, of reduced dimension for the faithful. The most sacred space of the altar was highlighted by the architectural treatment of the first bay of the choir. The stained glass windows, no doubt, diffused a diaphanous light which offered a paradisiacal view of the sacred space of this place. Secondly, in order to enhance the importance of the sacred relics preserved in the cathedral, and in order to ensure his religious authority, the bishop and the Chapter wished to magnify the sanctuary and, therefore, to modify it. A new setting was designed to highlight the sacred relics, the Christological symbols, while the color of the paintings reinforced the symbolic luminosity of the embodied God. At the same time, the aim being that of encouraging pilgrims in their walking towards and into the cathedral, the liturgical choir was pushed backwards to the crossing to leave more space to the faithful in the nave. The openwork choir screen also favored the visibility of the sacred relics that the pilgrims went toward. Thus, two distinct periods of the religious history of Noyon determined two types of sanctuarization.

This article addresses versions of the legend of Trajan occuring between the late seventh-century Whitby’s Anonymous and the fifteenth century. As it is a legend which treats the salvation of a persecutor of Christianity, it is not strange that it arouses some skepticism, and thus initially generated arguments that tried to deny or confirm it. Subsequently the legend, already accepted, was used to support other types of arguments advanced by an array of impressive authorities, including John the Deacon, Jacobus de Voragine, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante and the commentaries on the Divine Comedy. The various arguments related to the legend of Trajan are the subject of this study.

This article examines the attention given by Cornelius Agrippa and Giordano Bruno to De mirabilibus mundi, a late scholastic text, probably written in the thirteenth century. Its focus is Agrippa’s attitude, expressed in De occulta philosophia, toward the secrets of nature examined by De mirabilibus sources, such as Liber aneguemis. In addition, the article discusses how Giordano Bruno in the De magia mathematica attempts to explain the causal mechanisms of different types of extraordinary properties, first with a Hermetic book, Alexander De septem herbis, and then with a synthesis of the Avicennian thesis on the transitive imagination and Al-kindi’s astrological theories, expressed in De radiis. Finally, it shows how Agrippa and Bruno tried to resolve the problem of “quid sit magia” using De mirabilibus mundi sources.

This article contextualizes the emergence of the figure of the Sibyl in church ceremony and its incorporation as a character in Nativity and Epiphany plays, where the Sibyl Tiburtina appears merged with the Sibyl Eritrea, who talks with the emperor, and announces the advent of the Messiah and the signs of Doomsday. As a textual example, an edition of the fifteenth-century play “Lo Fet de la Sibil·la ab l’Emperador Cèsar de Sant Bartomeu de Bas” (Osona) is included.

The revival of Origen’s work was a crucial step for Renaissance attempts to reconcile Platonic philosophy and Christian tradition. The rediscovery of his texts in the fifteenth century allowed scholars to better understand his words, despite the problematic nature of Rufinus’s version, and to move away from the reductio of St. Jerome. During the second half of the century the circulation of Origenistic ideas was increasing: the article shows significant examples of the uses of Origen’s ideas at that date, particularly in Florence. My aim, therefore, is to demonstrate the fruitful manipulation by Ficino of Origen’s thinking, in particular on the subject of the ascent and descent of the soul, on the Platonic and Pythagorean idea of the transmigration of the soul, and on the description of hell’s pains. The use of Origen is problematic and subterranean, and deals with the complex Christianity of the Alexandrian church father, and with the intersection of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Ficino. Though not as daring as Pico, Ficino also used profitably some of Origen’s ideas on the common Platonic pattern.

Biblical books are vividly illumined by frequent images of light, which may vary depending on different editions and reverberate in the mind of readers with varying degrees of resplendence. This occurs due to both discrepancies between different versions of the Holy Writ which have been offered by translators and curators, and the different ways in which figures from the books of the Bible were taken into consideration in paratextual materials. In fact, dedicatory epistles, commentaries and illustrations are in turn rich of images of brightness, which draw on, develop and interpret those suggested by the Scriptures. In this brief essay, focusing on some of the most significant Renaissance editions of the Bible (Malerbi 1490; Brucioli 1530, 1532, 1542–1547; Diodati 1641), some relevant “images of radiance” are examined: 2 Pet. 1.19 (where the prophetic word is compared to a lamp which is shining in the dark); Exod. 34.33 (where it is said that Moses covered the brilliance of his own face with a veil); John 1.1 (where it is deplored that the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it), especially analyzing the impact of their interpretation on the Renaissance debate on the ways and methods of transmission of Christian doctrine and the aim of the Holy Scriptures.

According to Max Weber there is an elective affinity between university and foundation. The basic idea of the universitas is the free alliance between teachers and pupils for the purpose of academic studies, and is opposed to any access by sovereign powers; also the foundation is free in that it is only subject to the original will as formulated by the founder and cannot be dominated by anyone else, particularly later generations. The freedom of both is based on the unlimited period of time ascribed to them. Foundations are dedicated to a never-ending specific purpose and academic studies were considered to be selfpropagating and a permanent fixture of society in much the same way as the church or a municipality. The foundation also has an elective affinity with science in its modern understanding as research. Moreover science, as it has been understood since the eighteenth century, is a continuing process of enlightenment which from the temporal perspective directly corresponds to the concept of the foundation in that it provides tangible commodities for permanent use. However, where the term “science” is separated from the concept of infinite progress, as it is in the New Philosophy of Science (P. K. Feyerabend a. o.), the Maecenas can take the place of the founder for whom every successful work of art and post-modern science is of equal value.

Charles H. McIlwain coined the concept of “medieval constitutionalism” late in his career, when he decided to enter the debate over Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan. He used the concept to describe the power of the medieval king who was both limited by fundamental law and an independent legal system, and absolute in imposing his will in the government of his kingdom. In the eyes of McIlwain, Roosevelt’s attack on the independence of the judiciary violated one of the most basic achievements of the Western legal tradition. Though heavily contested from the outset, the concept of medieval constitutionalism met with success in the historiography of political thought. In particular, Brian Tierney adapted the idea in order to demonstrate how the constitutional tradition is rooted in the teaching of canon law. The ongoing success of the concept rests on the fact that it denotes the continuity of the debate on the limitations of government, as well as the entrenched legalism of medieval political thought.