Viator

Guillaume de Flaix was a child convert and a forced convert from Judaism, baptized during the Crusaders’ assaults on Rouen’s Jews in 1096. This article considers Guillaume’s baptism, his extant works, and his conversion. It begins with the account of Guillaume’s forced baptism. It then considers his works, and argues that Guillaume was more Christianized than the other converts from Judaism of his day. Finally, it extrapolates Guillaume’s paradigm for converting from his writings, and argues that his model was built on his experiences as a forced convert, a monk, and a Jewish convert. Guillaume defined conversion as involuntary, a rejection of family and vice, reciprocal, an internal reorientation of self, monastic, precarious, and penitential. Thus, this article concludes that Guillaume converted again after his baptism, embracing Christianity as a sincere convert and an orthodox monk.

The Miracula sancti Ursmari recounts an eleventh-century tour of relics during which monks from Lobbes brought peace to squabbling Flemish knights. While it could be assumed that the monks mediated between antagonists or organized reconciliation ceremonies, peacemaking in this text is not the arbitration of disputes but rather a conveyance of transformative grace; it is a sacrament offered to Flemish communities whose ethos of fighting reflects the region’s need for religious reform. Methods of arbitration or compromise undertaken in the absence of the saint are parodies of peace: any tranquility they bring is illusory and consequently betrayed by renewed conflict. This text prompts us to reexamine conflict narratives for theological understandings of pax that structure the depiction of a dispute resolution. The descriptions should not be taken as prima facie evidence of medieval social ordering but treated as guides to monastic aspirations during a period of church reform.

The article examines the “Byzantine theory” of the origin of East European Jewry against textual evidence on Judeo-Greek cultural activity in Kievan Rus’. Since some Judeo-Greek texts have been preserved in East Slavic translations, it may be assumed that in Medieval Rus’ contact with the Jews—the local representatives of Byzantine culture—and access to their book collections was at a certain stage more readily available than was contact with distant Constantinople. This assumption enables us to raise the question of the existence of a “Jewish channel” in the cultural interference within the framework of the Byzantine Kulturbereich, and specifically of Byzantine influence in Rus’ in the earliest stage of its cultural development.

The Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks, medical texts in Old English written probably in the ninth century, contain several chapters on paralysis (OE lyftadl) and its treatment. This article examines these texts and their presumed Latin sources in an attempt to determine how an Anglo-Saxon physician might have understood paralysis and whether this understanding is reflected in the prescribed remedies. The evidence indicates that paralysis, even of the hemiplegic type (OE healfdead adl), was believed to occur when abnormal humors blocked channels in the “sinews” (peripheral nerves) that link the central nervous system to the muscles and sensory organs of the body. The treatment recommended for paralysis in both the Leechbooks and their Latin sources is clearly informed by this classical theory, attributed to Erasistratos of Alexandria, which became part of the knowledge-base of Anglo-Saxon medicine.

In spite of the sustained interest among medievalists in women’s spirituality and collective institutions, women’s own understanding of the religious significance of community has received relatively little attention. This article explores attitudes toward community at the thirteenth-century monastery of Helfta. It does so through an examination of the process of the creation of The Book of Special Grace, associated with Mechtild of Hackeborn, and The Herald of Divine Love, associated with Gertrude of Helfta, as well as through an investigation of the religious meaning to the nuns of Helfta of the literary endeavor that produced this literature.

This article clarifies the ways in which a civic spectacle such as Venice’s lavish celebration of the Purification, the Feste delle Marie, functioned as an opportunity to articulate alternatives to the dominant understanding of the social order. Although intended to honor the Virgin and present Venice as united and prospering, the festival was repeatedly marred by disorderly behavior and ultimately abolished by the authorities. The article examines contemporary sources, including Pace del Friuli’s Descriptio festis gloriosissime Virginis Marie and Boccaccio’s Decameron, to highlight a growing disjuncture during the fourteenth century between popular and official conceptions of the festival. Disruptive behavior at the festival was neither blasphemous nor spontaneous, but a public performance that endorsed a vision of Venetian society based on a neighborhood rather than a municipal identity, on competition instead of unity.

Examining four narratives of the “Good Parliament” of 1376, this essay explores the shifting meanings of commune in late medieval English political writing. Considering the ways in which each harnesses the rhetoric of community reveals a late fourteenth-century anxiety about political communities, unanimity, and competing systems for classifying different types of persons. The texts—Piers Plowman, the Anonimalle Chronicle, Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicle, and the parliamentary rolls—present very different accounts of what the commune was, who was included, who was excluded, and who was invisible. Using the crisis of 1376 as an example, the article also argues that the use of modern political terms such as “conservative” and “radical” may hide rather than illuminate the political stakes and categories of the period, obscuring how complex and varied the responses to a changing system of government were at this time.

The article concerns the relationship between the monarchy and local ruling elites in late medieval Spain. The building of a centralized power in that period has been studied as the victory of the Crown over other power institutions, such as nobility or self-governing towns. Nevertheless the author problematizes this issue through the analysis of the measures carried out by the Catholic Monarchs over the Marquesado de Villena, an extensive Castilian lordship incorporated within the realm under their rule. We see how the monarchy dealt with the local ruling elites in order to impose royal authority: their negotiations reveal the establishment of absolute royal power, respecting, however, previously existing power institutions. This article challenges the traditional concept of authoritarian monarchy.

The fourteenth-century treatise called the Chapelet des vertus survives in fourteen manuscripts and sixteen printed editions, including seven incunables. Descended from an earlier French treatise, the Fleurs de toutes vertus, which in turn was descended from a still earlier Italian treatise, the Fiore di virtù, the derivative Chapelet was the form in which later medieval France knew this material. A simple collection of philosophical, patristic, and biblical quotations arranged topically by the individual virtues and vices, it circulated among members of the royal family and important courtiers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Chapelet des vertus achieved its greatest impact, however, through its use by the French poet and essayist Christine de Pizan in the composition of her Epistre Othea. She was perhaps drawn to it by the Chapelet’s emphasis on prudence, a favorite theme of Christine’s. Her clever manipulation of this resource reveals an aspect of Christine’s scholarly methods previously unknown.

Recent work on lying and the “sins of the tongue” during the Middle Ages focuses almost exclusively on an Augustinian theological and pastoral tradition in which all lies were condemned as sinful and destructive to society. While undeniably important, this attention to scholastic and theological debate paints an oddly misshapen portrait of the medieval discourse of lying and deception. Attention to courtly treatises like John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Christine de Pizan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies reveals an alternative discourse in which certain forms deceptive behavior and mendacious speech were conceived as inherently virtuous ways of achieving and maintaining necessary social harmony. Close comparison between scholastic writers (including Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and John Buridan) and Christine’s work, highlights the precise differences between these conflicting ethical discourses, while suggesting that even theologians were growing increasingly dissatisfied with Augustine’s absolute prohibition against lies.

Following Philippe Ariès, scholarship on medieval children has focused not on childhood per se but on parent-child relations, seeking to show these either in positive or in negative terms. This article attempts to understand childhood and the ways boys and girls were socialized into their respective genders in later medieval England without privileging the parent-child nexus. It also engages with work by James Schultz on the vocabulary used to designate children by looking at Middle English usage, and work by Barbara Hanawalt on fatal childhood accidents recorded in coroners’ rolls. The article explores the fragility of the statistical findings from coroners’ rolls before going on to explore the same source qualitatively. In particular it considers play, a particular characteristic of childhood, and interactions between siblings and peers. Girls may have learned nurturing roles from an early age, but parental interaction seems have been limited and benign neglect was perhaps fairly normal.

This article examines how five poets of the later Middle Ages (Lawrence of Durham, Leonius of Paris, Peter Riga, Alexander of Ashby, and Petrus Episcopus) internalized and transformed the biblical narrative, while putting it in verse. All five present the process of writing poetry as an intellectual and spiritual exercise. More important, their aim is to create for their readers a helpful tool for learning the true stories of the Bible and a concise compendium of Christian doctrine. The article is divided into three parts: 1. professed reasons for writing; 2. intended readership; and 3. writing strategies. The story of Joseph and his brothers is examined in order to present the different ways in which the biblical text was modified by the versifiers. This analysis shows that for medieval writers the Bible was not only a repository of revealed truth but also an inspirational source for poetic creation.

This article explores the relationship between Nicholas of Cusa and the European art of his time, noting a structural link between Cusanus’s philosophy and artistic expression. There is a meaningful similarity between the iconological messages of masterpieces of Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Michael Pacher and Cusanus’s thought. Specifically, Nicholas of Cusa and some contemporary art both expressed the idea of the relationship between a human being and God as a perspective of ego on infinity. The article offers new critical proposals: it is possible to clarify the paradoxical relationship between Nicholas of Cusa and the intellectual world of his time; we can also comprehend the real philosophical meaning of the figurative use of perspective, and the metaphysical value of Cusanus’s docta ignorantia; finally, it possible to observe an essential aspect of European Renaissance culture as a mystical-theoretical movement. Through the comparison here developed between Nicholas of Cusa and the art of his time, we understand more fully the philosophical meaning of Renaissance art, as well as essential aspects of Cusanus’s thought.

John Gunthorpe became a master of arts at Cambridge University; he then spent time in Italy engaged in humanistic study with Guarino da Verona in Ferrara, and subsequently spent time in papal service. Returning to England in 1465, he entered the service of King Edward IV, for whom he functioned in a variety of roles, including chaplain, almoner, ambassador, councilor, clerk of parliament, and dean of the chapel royal. Edward IV also made him warden of King’s Hall, Cambridge. Cambridge granted Gunthorpe a bachelor’s degree in theology. Gunthorpe was supported financially through multiple ecclesiastical benefices, the most eminent being the position of dean of Wells Cathedral, to which he was elected in 1472. King Richard III made Gunthorpe keeper of the privy seal; and after 1485 Gunthorpe took up residence in Wells, giving occasional service to King Henry VII. Gunthorpe died in 1498, and his tomb remains in Wells Cathedral.

According to an old historical tradition, the Reformation marked a fundamental break from the Middle Ages. The tradition has a point, because the Reformation really did bring major change. But it is also misleading, because it confuses the reformers’ point of view with the history from which that point of view emerged. Seen from a broad perspective, the Reformation continues European-wide developments beginning around the turn of the millennium, including the creation of a governmental church under the leadership of popes like Gregory VII, Alexander III, and Innocent III. Of course, that is not how the protagonists of the Reformation saw things. They defined themselves in terms of theological distinctions, opposing Protestants both to each other and to Catholics; and they sharpened national distinctions between Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and so on. In their own eyes they surely did break with the Middle Ages, and their self-understanding was a crucial ingredient in their success. But it ought not to be confused with history. The differences between Protestants and Catholics—like those between the European nations and the conventional distinction between medieval and modern history—obstruct an understanding of European history as a whole. The purpose of this essay is to lay the possibility of such an understanding before both medievalists and early modernists.