Viator

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Regula Donati, a seventh-century rule for nuns which was influenced by the Columbanian (or “Hiberno-Frankish”) monastic movement. The rule combines elements of the Regula Benedicti, Caesarius's Regula ad virgines and the Rules ascribed to Columbanus. I show that a close comparison of the original texts with Donatus's “revision” provides a wealth of information about everyday life in early medieval monasteries (e.g., the role of writing and literacy, manual labor, and clothing) and also reveals fundamental shifts in spirituality and monastic theology, particularly a shift from concepts of discipline based on obedience, humility, prohibition, punishment, and enclosure towards a system that is based on knowledge, control, permission, and the practice of confession and penance. The text of the Regula Donati has traditionally been dismissed as a mere compilation of older monastic rules, yet Donatus succeeds in producing an entirely new and innovative monastic program through conscious omissions, rearrangement of his material, and subtle shifts in terminology.

Through analyzing Bede's hymn to St. Agnes, Illuxit alma saeculis, this article explores the pliant nature of hagiography and reveals how alterations to the biblical language used in different versions of a saint's passion can dramatically alter how such a figure is perceived. After establishing that the principal hagiographic source underlying IAS is the Passio Sanctae Agnetis (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina [henceforth BHL] 156), this article examines the biblical allusions embedded into the PSA's prose narrative. While the author(s) incorporated numerous Old and New Testament citations, the majority of such allusions appear to have been deployed to characterize Agnes as a Bride of Christ in very feminine language. A comparison of the biblical language used in IAS, however, reveals that Bede realigned Agnes's legend to one scriptural work: Apocalypse. The article concludes by using Bede's Expositio Apocalypseos to analyze how he modified the PSA in order to create a far more relevant spiritual exemplum for his brethren at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow.

This article addresses literary techniques used by Alcuin of York to incorporate works from Classical Latin, Christian Latin, and Insular Latin into his epic Versus de Patribus Regibus et Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae. Focus is placed on the episode of Oswald's cross and the victory over the British forces of Cadwallon at Heavenfield. Comparison is made between Alcuin's version of the story and that of his primary source Bede, who himself employed language from accounts of the legend of Constantine's vision of the cross at the Milvian Bridge. Discussion is given to the interplay between the York poem and Virgil's Aeneid that results from Alcuin's application of the allusive construction known as Kontrastimitation. Finally, a treatment of typology as a construct in medieval biblical exegesis and historiography leads to a comparison between the Oswald-cross episode and chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel, concerning Nebuchadnezzar's golden statue.

Scholarly work on the Carolingian ecclesia, especially in relation to church consecration liturgies, has focused largely on ecclesia's spiritual and communal meanings rather than its architectural one. This article turns attention to the physical building in order to understand how the dedication ritual transformed the structure into a sacred space. A close reading of early medieval consecration ordines reveals their principal emphasis on church architecture, while further analysis of liturgical texts demonstrates how the prominence given to the physical and spatial allowed for the creation of the universal community of the faithful (that is, the spiritual ecclesia) within the church's walls. Lay presence is then considered to determine the nature of the laity's role in the rite. Ultimately, in reexamining the interplay between space and community, the article highlights the importance of placing the church building at the center of future considerations of the Carolingian polity.

As both antiquarian and more recent studies have noted, bells played a central role in medieval Christianity. This article aims to show that the history and meanings of church bells are more complex than often assumed. Drawing on a mixture of archaeological and textual material, the article demonstrates that a variety of types of bell—and indeed other signaling devices—were found in early medieval Christianity, and argues that the social and spiritual meanings of bells, whilst in some aspects determined by liturgical texts of the eleventh century, could also vary markedly depending upon the context, use, and reception of their sound. A bell calling a community to prayer was thus not simply “marking” the hours; it was summoning and producing the spiritual community, and its voice could be contested and even on occasion rejected.

This article examines artistic representations of intercession (third-party advocacy) in early medieval Europe ca. 800–1100, focusing upon how a common Byzantine intercessory schema (the Deēsis) was adopted and adapted by Western artists. I argue that the Deēsis composition, while used in a variety of ways in medieval Europe, underwent a number of significant transformations which reflect a different sense of the intercessory process and the role of its participants. In particular, Western artists recast Deēsis in order to incorporate the petitioner within the representative frame, a change that gave greater importance to the propinquity of petitioner and intercessor than to the latter‘s exalted status vis-à-vis the (heavenly) ruler.

This article considers the cultural implications of the distinctive use of Old Testament personal names by Brittonic-speaking peoples (Welsh, Breton, and Cornish) in the centuries down to ca. 1100. An argument is made that the origin of the tradition is early, developing among the Britons in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. The case is made for the geographic dispersal of the practice, for the constructedness of British ecclesiastical identity, and the maintenance of the tradition among successive communities of the Brittonic-speaking peoples despite their other differences.

This article places a section of sculpture-work, likely produced during the Anglo-Danish regnum and found in the rubble of the Old Minster, Winchester, within a political, cultural and ideological context. The fragmentary nature of the find poses difficulties in dating the work on stylistic grounds, determining its original length, and discerning its intended message. In suggesting answers, the scope of evidence analyzed and scholarship referenced is necessarily broad, but emphasis is placed on political history, artistic developments in architecture and poetry in England and Scandinavia, and the cross-cultural character of the English courts of King Cnut and his immediate successors.

Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), theologian at the Parisian abbey of St. Victor, has long been recognized as an important contributor to the growth of historical awareness during the twelfth century. In particular, for Hugh historia was the organizing principle of theology and thus central to the reformation of fallen humanity; as a result, Hugh‘s emphasis on discerning the eternal through the temporal meant he had to confront the dangers of reliance on mutable things. His acknowledgement of this problem and his attempts to overcome it are documented forcefully in two works often neglected by scholars of Victorine thought: De vanitate mundi and the Homilies on Ecclesiastes. By offering a close reading of these two texts, this article argues that Hugh‘s meditation on the ambivalence of mutability is crucial to an understanding of his conceptions of time and history.

This article provides dates for the Topographia Hibernica's five versions based on manuscript information and internal textual analysis. The results correct the assumption that Gerald of Wales revised the Topographia intermittently until the end of his life. Instead, the versions are placed within concrete contexts as both reactive to specific events and received by specific audiences: Version I (and to an extent II) can be located in the Angevin court prior to Henry II's death, while Versions II, III, and IV are directed at a clerical audience. A letter accompanying many Version III texts directs it to William de Vere, bishop of Hereford, while a new discovery of extracts from the Topographia in William de Montibus's Similitudinarium links Version IV with the pastoral care movement at Lincoln during Gerald's first “retirement” there. Version V was again directed at the Angevin court, to King John around 1209, urging renewed action in Ireland.

Francesco Petrarca, famously urging the renewal of both classical letters and classical virtues, proclaimed his sense of alienation from his own age and his preference for the company of the illustrious men of antiquity to whom he paid tribute. The notable exception was his relationship with the king of Naples, Robert of Anjou, whom he chose as sponsor of his poetic coronation in 1341. That choice and its little-explored background are rich in implications for Petrarch's vastly ambitious conception of his own role, and its importance did not diminish with the king's death in the following year. In the coordination of depictions of the king dispersed throughout his corpus of literary, epistolary, and historical works in Latin, Petrarch constructs and then elaborates Robert's association with the coronation event into that of a coprotagonist in the renewal of an ideal of enlightened kingship and patronage.

The Orosius, Historiae adversus Paganos, published here belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge. It was printed on paper by Herman Lichtenstein of Vicenza ca. 1475. Its architectural frontispiece is a significant addition to the known incunables illuminated in the Veneto, and can be attributed to an important artist, Giovanni Vendramin. He was active in Padua, where his father was bidello (stationer) of the University, and Ferrara, where he signed an initial in one of the manuscript choir books for the Cathedral. A list on the last leaf detailing different types of decoration is an important discovery. So far no other example in a printed book of a practice familiar from manuscripts appears to be known. Its purpose was to calculate payment to the artist, though pro rata rates are not given. The inserted arms, yet to be identified, indicate that as with other similar luxury copies the original owner was noble.

This article offers a reconstruction of a chapel, set up in England in the 1470s to commemorate a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The reconstruction follows information drawn from the founder‘s will. Made up of architectural components, paintings, wooden models, stones, maps, and a manuscript narrative, the composition was designed to evoke the Holy Land in England. Rooted as it is in the tradition of architectural response to pilgrimage, it also appears to be a product of a different tradition and use of architecture, that of the English Easter Sepulchre. A map of the Holy Land preserved in the Bodleian Library seems to be the only component to have survived. The article studies the installation in relation to a wide-ranging European tradition, that of relocating the Holy Land in the homeland, and discusses in more detail the insertion of a map of the Holy Land into the category of fifteenth-century devotional imagery.

The Tale of Gareth combines Malory's interest in the ethics of the chivalric body with an emphasis on Gareth's conduct around food. Beginning his time in Arthur's court as a kitchen hand, he is deprived of courtly alimentation, particularly meat, and the associations of social entitlement that come with the consumption of such meals. Gareth proves his chivalric worth not only by fighting, but also through his exemplary behavior whilst consuming increasingly refined meals throughout the tale, culminating in his own wedding feast. Not only do these meals articulate the non-combative qualities that attest to Gareth's social superiority; they establish Gareth as a fitting symbolic successor to Arthur and his legacy, and thus offer an assurance of the inherent worthiness of the Arthurian regime despite its eventual tragic demise.

It has generally been assumed that the Exeter Book Riddles are indebted to Latin riddling tradition. Yet the connection between Anglo-Latin enigmata and the Exeter collection has normally focused on the former's role as sources to the detriment of other aspects like structure and organization. Not much attention has been paid to the possibility that the Exeter Riddles might have been compiled according to structural criteria similar to those found in Anglo-Latin enigmata. The first sequence of the Exeter Riddles (nos. 1-40) offers a fairly consistent thematic arrangement: the collection opens with a series of cosmological motifs, followed by a group of ornithological themes, four-footed animals, varied tools, and a cosmological composition (no. 40). On this basis, this essay investigates the existence of thematic boundaries, examining evidence of what seems to have constituted a source-collection in the manner of preceding Anglo-Latin models.

The work of Carolingian theologian Ratramnus of Corbie, De corpore et sanguine Domini, was rediscovered and published in Cologne in 1531. This article examines how the work was used as an argument for a purely symbolic understanding of the Eucharist, particularly by Swiss evangelical Heinrich Bullinger. It argues that, for Bullinger and for English writers and thinkers in the 1530s and 1540s, Ratramnus came to embody the early patristic tradition, allowing evangelicals to argue against the Catholic position of transubstantiation while still maintaining their connection to Augustine and other Fathers. Thomas Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley adopted Ratramnus as a symbol of the patristic tradition, but they did not accept Bullinger‘s reading of Ratramnus, which, they may have recognized, was occasionally forced. Precisely because Ratramnus was actually an advocate of real presence in the Eucharist, he became particularly influential for Cranmer and Ridley in 1549.