Viator

"Classical Quotations and Allusions in the Correspondence of Thomas Becket: An Investigation of Their Sources," Letters issued by and addressed to Thomas Becket contain an unusually high number of quotations from, echoes of, and allusions to the Latin classics. Making full use of the author's new edition of the Correspondence of Thomas Becket, this article discusses the nature of that exploitation; argues that it is possible to differentiate between highly educated Latinists like John of Salisbury, on the one hand, and the generality of superficially educated clerks on the other; and proposes that the Florilegium Gallicum may have furnished the latter with many of their quotations.

"Incarceration and Liberation: Prisons in the Cistercian Monastery." This article explores the means by which Cistercians from the thirteenth century were able to use and justify imprisonment in their monastic houses. It traces the invention of the monastic prison from the advent of cenobitic monasticism and explores the discursive construction of captivity as a fundamental element of western monastic life. The author particularly looks at the tension between spiritual understandings of freedom in confinement, and the reality of actual incarceration in a monastic setting. The article positions a history of monastic prisons within specific cultural contexts; in this way, it departs from a traditional reading of imprisonment as part of legal and political history. In tracing the meanings given to imprisonment by Cistercians, the author contends that medieval understandings and uses of imprisonment were closely linked to understandings of space and that the specific historical and ecclesiastical contexts of the early thirteenth century were pivotal to Cistercian justifications of incarceration.

"'Le dreit enfer vus mosterruns'; Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz." The Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, a translation of the Latin Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, is the latest and least-studied of the three texts attributed to Marie de France. It argues that the act of translation defines a purgatorial space in which the question of the veridity of the locale of the space and the authority of the otherworldly vision can be negotiated through the accustomed tropes of the vernacular journey narrative. There are three parts to the argument; that in the Espurgatoire as in her other writings, Marie was highly self-conscious about the mechanisms of translation and narration; that the changes she made to the Tractatus can be seen to form a cohesive meditation on the status of truth claims in vernacular narrative; and that this strategy suggests, through the trope of the "droit enfer," the submerged presence of a similar meditation within the Latin corpus as well.

"Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard: The Letters of an Augustinian Canon and the Challenge of Innovation in Twelfth-Century Lorraine." The fifty-five letters of Hugh Metel (ca. 1080-1150), an Augustinian canon of Toul, were edited by C. L. Hugo in 1731, but have attracted little scholarly attention, even though some of them are addressed to such famous personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Heloise. This paper questions simplistic attempts to describe Hugh as a traditionalist by showing that although he admired Bernard of Clairvaux, he was much more interested than Bernard in combining classical poetic allusions with scriptural imagery. Hugh was interested in innovative educational trends in the twelfth century, but became critical of negative tendencies, such as those embodied in Peter Abelard. At the same time his two letters to Heloise provide valuable evidence into the extent of her reputation as an innovative writer. Hugh's prose is compared to other contemporary letter collections, in particular the Epistolae duorum amantium, which, this article argues, records the early letters of Abelard and Heloise.

"Wife-Swapping in Medieval Literature," This article responds to a recent claim by Felicity Riddy that the "gentilesse" exhibited by Arveragus and Aurelius in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale is inaccessible to women, since it is class-based and gender-based, and that Dorigen's sexuality is "property which the men propose to pass backwards and forwards between them in order to establish their status." Assuming that the background for this analysis lies in modern work on the exchange of women as a means of creating homosocial bonds between men, it surveys the numerous medieval narratives which deal with the exchange of a woman from one man to another. In all these narratives, women are erased, marginalized, or degraded in the interest of male friendship or moral solidarity. The Franklin's Tale forms a striking contrast to this medieval tradition: it is the marriage between Arveragus and Dorigen, not male friendship, that is the important relationship, and it is Dorigen's "trouthe," not her husband's, which is of paramount importance.

"Foundations of Venetian Naval Stragegy from Pietro II Orseolo to the Battle of Zonchio, 1000-1500." Early in the eleventh century the Venetian doge, Pietro II Orseolo, led a naval expedition against Dalmatian pirates based at the mouth of the Narenta River and turned away a Muslim fleet from Bari in Apulia. These two events laid the foundations of Venetian naval greatness. Fleets of galleys and fortified bases at strategic points along the major routes were the means that the Republic deployed to project its power over most of the eastern Mediterranean. For much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Venice was engaged in a struggle for supremacy with the other Italian maritime republics, Pisa and Genoa. Finally, in the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks began a combined military and naval offensive that eventually stripped Venice of its overseas holdings. In 1499 at the Battle of Zonchio near the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, the Venetian fleet was decisively overwhelmed by a Turkish one.

"Publishing Watriquet's Dits," Watriquet de Couvin, fourteenth-century vernacular poet and minstrel, served the coterie of the counts of Valois in the late Capetian court. His poems, nearly all dits, survive in five manuscript collections produced by a single Parisian libraire whose identity can be surmised. Something of the contents of five other collections of Watriquet's verse, formerly in the library of King Charles V, can be identified from descriptions in the library's inventory. Although the collections were not identical either in content or in sequence, one sees within them smaller groupings that indicate how the poet kept his texts, Watriquet was involved in the production of the collections of his works, especially in devising the iconography of the illuminated manuscripts. In both text and image he indicates his acquaintance with an important contemporary book, the Roman de Fauvel in BNF fr, 146-whose creators, like Watriquet, probably also belonged to the Valois circle.

"The Origins of Modern Notation in Early Keyboard Music." Modern notation, which is based on absolute note values and organized in time units of equal duration (measures) separated by vertical lines (bar lines), can only partially be traced back to earlier mensural notation. Whereas the mensural system is associated with the structure of vocal polyphony as a hierarchy of relative note values, the earliest examples of keyboard notation from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represent an entirely different approach to writing music. This contains the basic ingredients of the modern notational concept, which, accordingly, is not primarily a product of the leading medieval and renaissance practice, but rather of a notational sidetrack which later moved into the center and opened up new possibilities of composition.

"Considerations on Huon d'Auvergne / Ugo d'Alvernia." This study examines an epic romance which probably originated in the twelfth century. Its complex textual tradition is represented by extant Franco-Italian manuscripts, by a striking reworking in Tuscan prose, by a later version in octaves, and by two early print editions. Scattered historical references and literary analogues provide evidence for its evolution and dating. The three-part narrative includes the protagonist's voyage to the underworld, a debt to Virgil's Aeneid that has echoes in later medieval texts such as Dante's Comedy. This study concludes by focusing on the note-worthy classicism of Andrea da Barberino's Florentine prose reworking. Unlike his French chanson de geste or Italian cantari models, Maestro Andrea cites a remarkable number of classical authors and personages and also includes unusual names and similes not normally found in Carolingian epic cycle texts. The reason for this must be sought in the literate populace of fifteenth-century Florence: religious piety and feudal devotion are now joined by a pragmatic humanism that must have appealed to Andrea's vernacular readers.

"The 'Plainsong Mass' of Reginaldus Liebert (ca. 1425): Some Practical Speculations on Speculative Practices." Although remaining little known, the three-voice mass cycle of the obscure Franco-Flemish composer Reginaldus Liebert is significant historically in that it comprises settings of all the Ordinary texts (excepting Ite missa est) as well as a full set of Marian Propers. As such, it represents the most comprehensive entity surviving from the late-medieval repertoire of liturgical polyphony. By virtue of its status as a unitary composition, the Liebert Mass affords a particularly valuable perspective on the interrelated issues of performance practice and tonal organization, both of which are inevitably affected by the modern interpreter's construal of the pitch sets implied by variable accidental signatures, the elaborated plainsongs present throughout as cantus firmi, and the invoking of both notated and unnotated pitch inflections. The results of this study lead the author to argue that the tenor voice is the key to tonal coherence throughout the cycle, the recognition of which allows for a systematic delivery of pitch content in the other voice parts.

"Gasping at Straw Men: The Politics of Fear in Early Modern French Farce." This paper examines the uses of derision of cowardly soldiers in comic plays and monologues which deal with war and battle in early modern France. Generally regarded as mere satires that voiced the peasants' ridicule of the cowardice of soldiers, these plays also raise anxieties, via plot and character, about the damage done to society and to individuals by military conflicts and the culture of war. Yet these concerns are skewed and misdirected, so that the audience is left guffawing at the wrong fears. The analysis involves two separate steps: the sociological use of misleading fears, as described in Barry Glassner's The Culture of Fear; and the use of humor to dismiss fear, as delineated in Rush Dozier's Fear Itself The study begins with the figure of the braggart free archer as encapsulated in the extant French comedies about him, both farces and sermons joyeux or comic monologues, from roughly 1450-1550, and goes on to discuss two other plays in which soldiers and battle serve as the loci of comedy yet which provide a glimpse into the devastation wars wreaked on the res publica.

"French Renaissance Manuscripts and L'Histoire du Livre." The article explores late French illuminated manuscripts (1515-1547) and their texts to establish their place in the discipline of L'Histoire du Livre alongside contemporary printed books. Evidence of authorship, production, dating, and readership offered by the manuscripts is significantly different and often unique. Ignoring this evidence risks misinterpreting and misdating movements in literature, translation, humanism, and the Reformation.

"Territorial Politics and Early Modern 'Fiscal Policy': Taxation in Savoy, 1559-1580," This article makes new suggestions about the structure and function of political interactions during the sixteenth century through an examination of tax practices in the French-speaking lands of Duke Emanuel Filibert of Savoy (1528-1580), The article documents fiscal and political relationships which crisscrossed social divides and political boundaries in the transalpine Savoyard domains, The author proposes the term "territorial politics" as a way of describing practices designed to project power over spaces. "Territorial politics" refers to the interactions that structured the way domination was exercised, without privileging particular actors (rulers, subjects, clergy), particular problems (taxation, urban protest, diplomacy), or a particular scale of political analysis (states, dioceses, towns, families), This study of the fiscal parameters of Savoyard territorial politics shows how informational control, widely based political opinion, and different kinds of political configurations involving numbers of actors from a range of social positions structured taxation patterns.

"Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian Renaissance Art," A signature announces an artist's responsibility for the work, even when it is a collaborative effort, The name is understood as a trademark announcing that the conception but not necessarily the execution is by the master. A signature may be an injunction enjoining the beholder's approbation or a prayer for divine favor or, starting with Michelangelo's Pietà, a shorthand reference to the ancient masters praised by Pliny for signing with faciebat. Whereas other signatures indicate completion, signatures using this imperfect verb suggest that the creation of a work of art is never complete. Not only what artists write but where they write is significant. Some signatures are incorporated within the image, whereas a signature on a fictive paper or cartellino (similar to the tituli used by Paolo Giovio for his portrait collection) is perceived as something added to the work, reminding the beholder of its origins as fabrication. In their illusionism, cartellini presage the development of trompe l'oeil painting as an independent genre.

"'Certaine Signes' of 'Faeryland': Spenser's Eden of Thanksgiving on the Defeat of the 'Monstrous' 'Dragon' of Albion's North." The work establishes England as the place where the unreformed lands of Eden are found and maps a journey from London to York. The Wandering Wood is explained as the expanse of Windsor Forest; the Houses of Pride and Holiness are discovered as allegories of Theobalds/Burghley House and Wormleighton in Warwickshire. Spenser contrasts the Puritan ideals of the Spencers with the pride of Elizabeth's secretary, Lord Burghley, whose claim to Trojan ancestry-the descendants of Aeneas-determines Spenser's employment of Virgilian devices for the book's underworld. Puritanism connects the image of a "new Hierusalem" with the Leicester movement and the city of Warwick. The arrival of the queen of Scots to the north of England in 1568 across the Solway Firth (into which the river Eden flows), which encouraged Catholic recusancy and rebellion and threatened England's constitution, is explained as Spenser's cause for writing The Faerie Queene. The consequence of Mary's arrival in England-the Rebellion of 1569 led by the Catholic earls in the north-is the pivot upon which the whole of The Faerie Queene 1 tums.

"Léry-Strauss: Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques." Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578), a work that Claude Lévi-Strauss described as "the ethnologist's breviary," surfaces as a palimpsest in the modern ethnologist's own book Tristes Tropiques. From his reading of a Huguenot who sought exile in Brazil from the European wars of religion, Lévi- Strauss retains more than a model destiny, as he adopts the nostalgic tone of his predecessor concerning both the origin and end of human history. The melancholy of Tristes Tropiques is already that of the History of a Voyage. It is true that the question of writing itself divides these two authors. Where Léry sees a benediction, Lévi-Strauss sees means of alienation and exploitation. Nevertheless, their respective experiences share, before and after the colonialist era and over a span of four centuries, a retrospective look at a world lost forever.