Viator

"Names, Ethnic Identity, and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy." Despite much recent work emphasizing the political construction and volatility of ethnic identity at the end of the Roman Empire, some scholars continue to see polarized communities of barbarian soldiers and Roman senators in the kingdom of Burgundy (443-534). In Burgundy the division of personal names between the counts (almost all Germanic) and the bishops (almost all Greco-Latin) might seem to support a theory of ethnic division. Nevertheless, individual aristocratic men and women behaved in consistently similar ways, founding churches, debating theology, serving in the royal government, corresponding, and leaving metrical Latin epitaphs. The division of names does stem from descent: the military counts from barbarian mercenaries, the bishops from senatorial families. But none of these people defined themselves as "Roman" or "Burgundian," and their provincial late antique world contained nothing resembling traditional ideas of Germanic culture. The mentalities of the lower classes remain more elusive, but scraps of evidence show that some of them served in the regional government of the Burgundian kings, and suggest that in rural areas their identities were defined by locality, not ethnicity.

"Who Wrote Hincmar's Ordines?" The study examines the four coronation ordines attributed to Archbishop Hincmar of Reims in order to determine whether or not Hincmar was really their author. Hincmar composed his works by borrowing from and slightly modifying other sources whenever possible. His method is illustrated by examples from the 866 Ordo of Ermentrude and the 869 Ordo of Charles the Bald. Examination of Hincmar's sources produces evidence to show that a major part of the 869 ordo was copied from an ordo composed for the recoronation of Louis the Pious as emperor in 835, thus essentially pushing our knowledge of coronation ceremonial back an entire generation. Although the ordines are indeed Hincmar's, he did not really write them, but basically compiled them.

"Charity and Enmity in the Writings of Anselm of Havelberg." Scholars interested in the writings of Anselm of Havelberg have generally assumed that his defense of the canonical life (the Epistola apologetica) , histoty of the faithful (De unitate fidei), and account of his debates with a Greek archbishop were all written during the period 1149-1151. In interpreting these works, this assumption has led scholars to construe the Epistola and De unitate fidei as expressions of the same ideas. This article seeks first of all to date Anselm's works and to demonstrate that the Epistola was written some ten years before De unitate fidei. Second, it shows that the caustic attack on monasticism of the Epistola should not be read into De unitate fidei, nor the charitable tenor of the latter into the former.

"From Prizes of War to Domestic Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000-1300." Most investigations of medieval slavery have concentrated on the disappearance of Roman slavery before the year 1000 or on the expanding slave trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. This article examines how new power relations affected the nature of slavery in Catalonia and Aragon between 1000 and 1300, as the military balance in the Iberian peninsula shifted in favor of the Christian north. Acquired through war and distributed through a tributary economy, Muslim slaves were at first not easily integrated into the world of their owners. The rise of a commercial economy, however, transformed slavery into primarily an urban phenomenon. As artisans and prosperous burghers acquired slaves for domestic labor, women began to appear much more frequently than men on the slave market and were more firmly attached to the households of their owners than earlier. Slavery was therefore not a mere vestigial element of a vanished Roman world; rather, it takes us to the heart of social change in the medieval Mediterranean. Six documents are included in the appendix.

"Beyond Positivism and Genre: 'Hagiographical' Texts as Historical Narrative." This essay argues that attempts to identify criteria by which to distinguish a genre of "hagiography" from "historiography" are bound to fail because there can be no single definition of "hagiography" or of "historiography" that is universally valid. Historical narrative, in particular, must be understood in relation to the political context in which it is produced. The essay considers the problem of the "genre of hagiography" by taking into account the major changes in conceptions of historiography and in political structures which took place in the twelfth century and again in the nineteenth century. It concludes that the concept of "hagiography" is an ideological tool generated in the nineteenth century to serve nineteenth-century purposes; the concept of "hagiography" had no function in earlier centuries, and therefore did not exist. It argues in particular that the ideological construction "hagiography" should not be utilized in analyses of ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century Francia.

"Literacy and Violence in Twelfth-Century Bavaria: The 'Murder Letter' of Count Siboto IV." This article examines a letter preserved on the penultimate folio of the Codex Falkensteinensis, the miscellaneous personal archive compiled by Count Siboto IV of Falkenstein between 1166 and 1200, in which Siboto requests that his vassal Ortwin of Merkenstein dispose of one of Siboto's enemies, Rudolf of Piesting. The letter provides a unique optic with which to examine questions of lay literacy, the disputing process, penitential practice, and the exercise of power in southern Germany and Austria in the twelfth century. However, this unique document also indicates the limits of historical analysis since, despite its value for understanding twelfth-century society, one cannot determine whether it is a genuine letter or mandate, a forgery, or part of an elaborate threat through which Siboto hoped to threaten Rudolf and, indirectly, Siboto's other enemies.

“The Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century." This article deals with the questions of how sermons were prepared and transmitted in the Middle Ages (especially the twelfth century), how they were preached, to whom they were addressed, and in what language they were delivered. It discusses the conception, delivery, transcription. and preservation of sermons, which often survive in a form very different from the way they were preached. With regard to the audiences of sermons, it studies the type and degree of linguistic divergences and the extent of bilingualism. Some clerics did not understand Latin and some laypeople knew Latin, and both groups seem to have liked some Latin in sermons. The article concludes that sermons were preached not only in Latin to the clergy and in the vernacular to the laity but also (contrary to the view of many scholars) in a mixed, or macaronic, language to mixed audiences. The stories of miraculous understanding of sermons in foreign languages show that the listeners did not always know the language in which the sermon was preached.

"The Historical Importance of Godfrey of Viterbo." This article challenges a number of assumptions that have collectively informed the prevailing scholarly perception of the late twelfth-century chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo. In particular, the study contests the beliefs that Godfrey held a prominent position in the imperial chancery, that he enjoyed a close personal association with the Hohenstaufen rulers Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI, and that his works served a political function at the imperial court. A critical review of the pertinent historical evidence demonstrates that all three of these assumptions are based ultimately on the chronicler's own self-promotional statements and on previous scholars' misinterpretations of the medieval transmission of his works. Following from this conclusion, the article offers a reanalysis of the evolution of Godfrey's works in light of their author's career and position at the court.

“Andreas Capellanus's Scholastic Definition of Love." Although most recent discussion of Andreas Capellanus's famous definition of love centers on the question whether it should be seen as an ironic allusion to Scripture in the patristic tradition or as a physiological description in the medical tradition, it is probably best viewed as a philosophical definition in the early scholastic tradition. Close examination of the definition in the light of Andreas's own commentary on it and of parallels from contemporary scholastic writers reveals that it conforms to Aristotelian requirements for definition and that it makes appropriate use of major concepts of medieval logic and psychology. It also appears to have been formulated implicitly in terms of Aristotelian causality, Despite certain difficulties, probably attributable to fluctuations in terminology in the early scholastic period, it is a carefully constructed, properly scientific definition drawing on a long philosophical tradition.

“When Arthur Held Court in Caer Llion: Love, Marriage, and the Politics of Centralization in Gereint and Owein." Owein and Gereint chronicle the process by which a group of independent kingdoms becomes subject to a central government, a process that focuses on the major concerns of the rulers of Gwynedd, most notably those of Llewelyn ap Iowerth: the desire to justify a feudal Wales united under a single monarch, the attempt to standardize law codes and introduce a central judicial system, and the need to manipulate political alliances through a careful program of advantageous marriages. The romances’ call to unification profoundly affects their telling of the basic stories common to them and their French counterparts. The Welsh narratives systematically displace the French's discussion of fin afmor in favor of tales in which marriage functions as a metaphor for political alliance. Thus, these tales present not only an argument for central government but also a vindication of the means by which Llewelyn sought to attain that government.

"John of Sacrobosco and the Calendar." John of Sacrobosco was a thirteenth-century writer on quadrivial subjects who nowadays is remembered, if at all, for his treatise on the Sphere. His contemporaries, however, appear to have considered him primarily as a computist, or writer on the calendar. This article attempts to place Sacrobosco in the computistical tradition, and in the process to establish the nature of his contribution to calendar reform. Sacrobosco's computistical treatise, the De anni ratione, has generally been assumed to be the basic text for the liberal arts course of the medieval schools; but since some of its content is of an advanced nature, and both inaccurate and unorthodox, this appears unlikely. It was, in fact, modeled on an earlier schools treatise with which it has been confused, as a comparison between the two treatises shows. Finally, Sacrobosco's contemporaries credited him with having "divided time": this is a reference to his adoption of the system of time measurement using minutes and seconds which is still in use today.

"The Tradition of Nicholas of Biard's Distinctiones." Our knowledge of the thirteenth-century author Nicholas of Biard is scant and unreliable. He has left three works diffused by the university stationers: a collection of biblical Distinctiones, the Sermones de tempore et de sanctis, and, less securely attributed, the Summa de abstinentia. To construct a solid foundation upon which to build, this article presents the collected and tabulated data about the manuscript tradition of the first of these: namely, a list of all known manuscripts of the Distinctiones; a list of the more than 1300 chapter headings; an edition of two sample distinctions, Virga and Viator; and the edition of a Biard sermon in which these two distinctions are employed.

"Preachers, Teachers, and Translators: The Social Meaning of Language Study in Trecento Tuscany. " Recent scholarly studies have explicated a dynamic of popularization inherent in such medieval linguistic and literary genres as preaching and translation from Latin into the vernacular. This essay uses texts of the Italian Duecento and Trecento, by Brunetto Latini, Domenico Cavalca, and Aesop in Latin and Tuscan, to show how one essential model for preaching and translation was the work of that venerable figure of village and town, the Latin grammar master. Grammarians taught more than language skills; their discipline was also moralizing. Elementary grammar, moreover, worked conservatively, both in literary terms (in that it enforced genre distinctions and themes based on Latin models) and socially (in that it assumed hierarchical distinctions between the language realms and among writers, speakers, readers, and hearers). The grammar course aimed at initiating boys into an elite Latin world. Grammar teaching thus reinforced models of Latin wisdom literature that informed popularizing preaching and translation.

"Truth in Images: From the Technical Drawings of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, Campanus of Novara, and Giovanni de'Dondi to the Perspective Projection of Leon Battista Alberti." When Alberti justified artist's perspective projection in mathematical and theoretical terms, he relied on a graphic tradition best exemplified not by Euclidean geometric optics, as most commentators would have it, but by technical illustrations used in the creation of exceedingly precise instruments of measure. Long before artists employed Alberti's method of projection to recreate the world illusionistically, late medieval instrument makers were creating drawings that functioned as graphic substitutes for the real thing. Beyond a concern for verisimilitude, however, much broader shared assumptions existed between Alberti and earlier scientists. These assumptions depended on mathematical truth to chart the perfections of time and space. The drawings of planetary clocks, dials, and astrolabes by the fourteenth-century philosopher/astronomer Giovanni de'Dondi, as well as those by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician Campanus of Novara and the Arab engineer Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, signaled a new response to an ever more complex technology. Taken together, they reflect a growing, cumulative commitment among erudite craftsmen to the twin standards of mathematical rigor and illusionistic credibility, the very hallmarks of Alberti's more famous method of projection.

"Capgrave's Saint Katherine and the Perils of Gynecocracy." This essay examines the extended debate about female sovereignty that occurs in Book Two of John Capgrave's life of the virgin martyr Katherine of Alexandria. In Capgrave's 1445 narrative, the scholarly young queen of Alexandria defies the wishes of her mother and her lords, who urge her to marry so that a man can take charge of her realm. What follows is a debate of remarkable complexity, whose interpretation is further complicated by its context. On the one hand, Katherine's stature as a saint seems to authorize her radical assertion that a woman can govern as effectively as a man; on the other hand, her subjects' objections are persuasive, and Katherine's martyrdom, as Capgrave presents it, confirms their claim that government by a woman will not work. Capgrave uses Katherine's debate with her lords to address two issues of contemporary interest: the crisis of political authority in Henry VI's England, and the potentially subversive consequences of women's learning.

“Denys the Carthusian and the Invention of Preaching Materials." Exceptionally for a Carthusian monk, Denys the Carthusian produced a huge number of sermons and many works designed to aid preaching. He collected and ordered his materials, drawn from every type of medieval Christian literature and embracing hundreds of authors, according to techniques developed in the thirteenth century for compiling and organizing moral and preaching summas and research tools. He "recycled" texts originally collected in large commentaries, which served as "data-bases" for his literary activity, from one treatise or sermon to another. Untypically for his time and milieu, Denys emphasized the rational foundation of moral behavior and the importance of Scholastic speculation for the progress of the moral and spiritual life. Returning to older sources-especially from the thirteenth century-he sought to reform the popular piety of his time and gently correct prevailing attitudes among the devout.

“Aristotle's Poetics and the Rise of Vernacular Literary Theory." The article attempts to use the octavo edition of Aristotle's Poetics printed by Paulus Manutius in 1536 as a means of reconstructing the personal and political background to the literary debates of the 1530s. Engaged in a struggle with his relations over the future of the Aldine press, Paulus hoped to revive some of the enthusiasm of his father's time with a new series of Greek editions. Copy for the Poetics was provided by an influential family of Florentine exiles, the Pazzi, who during the early 1530s were cultivated by the French ambassadors as a possible means of fomenting anti-imperial activity in Italy. Friendship with the Pazzi made Paulus an intimate of the literary circle that gathered at the French embassy. Compact and published with a translation that made the Greek at least comprehensible, the Aldine text of the Poetics attracted the attention both of the committed Latinists of Padua and of the champions of the modern vernacular literature. Its ideas influenced Speroni's Dialoghi, and passed through them into Joachim du Bellay's Deffence et Illustration de la Longue Française.