Viator

This article re-addresses the question of the so-called Lateran in Aachen, mentioned in a number of texts produced in the wake of the Carolingian reform movement during the first decades of the ninth century. Scholars have searched for this “Lateran” as a physical space in the palace complex commissioned by Charlemagne in the late eighth century. This contribution tries to demonstrate that this search is problematic; the concept could also have been used in a more metaphorical or conceptual sense: Councils taking place in a “Lateran” would reflect the self-perception of the people gathered there, placing themselves in a Roman imperial and explicitly Constantinian tradition rather than demonstrating an actual architectural invocation of the Constantinian buildings in Rome. While the Lateran in the Carolingian sources may have referred to a specific part of the palace, it need never have been an official name, and may have only been used by a limited group of people with grand ideas and an even greater project on hand.

Though long known to specialists on Byzantine monasticism, the existence of proprietary religious institutions in Byzantium has attracted little attention from scholars who study their analogs in the medieval West (Eigenkirchen and -klöster). Contrary to some periodizations as well as general overviews of the subject, proprietary churches and monasteries constitute a diachronic feature of the organization of Byzantine and indeed Eastern Christian religious institutions and, unlike in in the medieval West, never disappeared or were attenuated by a “founder’s right” (ius patronatus). Rather, they existed diachronically alongside endowed religious institutions. Their prominence in Byzantine and post-Byzantine history has major implications for cross-cultural comparisons of Byzantine religious institutions with studies of their counterparts in the medieval West and elsewhere, which are often predicated on inaccurate or outdated interpretations of the origin and development of Byzantine religious institutions.

The legend of the Last Emperor was influential in medieval and early modern apocalyptic literature, and yet its origins are uncertain. Was it first developed in the late seventh-century Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, or in a lost fourth-century version of the Tiburtine Sibyl? Scholars have long been divided on this question, and yet the answer has implications for the understanding of the development of Christian apocalypticism, as well as the degree to which Islam was influenced by Christian eschatological beliefs. This article marshals a variety of evidence to prove the origin of the Last Emperor legend in Pseudo-Methodius in the seventh century. It argues that details of the description of the Last Emperor show a distinctive development from Syriac literary themes, and that the Last Emperor in the Tiburtine Sibyl is an early eleventh-century interpolation based on the ideas popularized by the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, likely having passed through a Byzantine Greek intermediary.

This article demonstrates that scribe-artists at Durham Cathedral Priory between ca. 1080 and 1150 developed a program of historiated images that focused solely on authors, authorial voice, and forms of textual authorities, which reflected an attempt to foster a culture of reading based on treating texts as the presence and personality of their authors. I argue that the impulse to represent authorship visually and the interest in textual presence at Durham was linked to the community’s intense devotion to their patron saint, Cuthbert. The growing connections between Cuthbert’s cult and the written word in the twelfth century established a broader link between presence and writing. From the example of Durham, I suggest that the tendency of twelfth-century writers to treat written texts as a form of personal presence should not be understood as part of a broad shift from presence to representation, but as evidence of the continued vitality of cultures of real and embodied presence in a world increasingly dominated by the written word.

The poems of troubadour Jaufre Rudel (fl. 1120-1147) took exception to the earlier songs of Guilhem IX; they burlesqued the commonplace associations of springtime and love and of love with joy; they took issue with monks; they even critiqued themselves. In short, as this article argues, Jaufre - or, at least, the persona invoked by his poems - was a contrarian, disposed to refute, deny, and oppose his elders and his contemporaries. But he did so subtly, ambiguously, often using the very vocabulary of those from whom he dissented.

Digenis Akritis, a twelfth-century Byzantine poem, recounts the life of Basil, a fictional hero of mixed descent (Byzantine and Arab), on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the ninth or tenth century. Since the poem’s rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, virtually all scholars have regarded Basil’s heroic nature as a given, and his transgressions (mostly sexual) as no more than one might expect of a man of action in a violent world. In contrast, I shall argue that the poem was intended as a cautionary tale of human weakness. My study has two parts. The first focuses on Basil as a man of uncontrollable impulses, leading a largely solitary life-except for the wife whom he adores and betrays. In encounters with other women, he is moved not just to infidelity but to sexual and even fatal violence; then, seized by guilt, he seeks to atone by creating ever more elaborate (and isolated) garden paradises. Throughout these experiences, Basil never seeks spiritual guidance, or asks God for forgiveness. The second part deals with the story’s possible origins. As no other extant work of Byzantine literature is thematically comparable, I trace those origins to Western Europe. French chansons de geste of the late twelfth century, and their close German derivatives, pioneered the realistic depiction of imperfect characters. Digenis Akritis emerges not just as a study in impulse and isolation, but as a rare instance of Western cultural influence in Byzantium.

The early Norwegian kings are scarcely attested in sources earlier than the twelfth century, in contrast to the rich and varied descriptions of them from twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources. It will be argued that the historical narrative of their reign had direct relevance for at least two contemporary issues during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One was the precedence of sons of kings in the order of succession to the Norwegian throne. This claim was strengthened by the genealogical lines of the Norwegian kings which existed from the 1120s or 1130s onwards and demonstrated that the Norwegian monarchy had always passed to heirs in the direct male line. Another important issue was the aspiration of the Norwegian kings to extend their rule to Iceland in the thirteenth century. Paradoxically, at this very time the view gained ground in saga narratives that Icelandic settlers had been opponents of the earliest Norwegian kings.

Beginning in 1259, rebel nobles in Catalonia and King James I (1213-1276) began to compose defiance letters to each other in their shared vernacular, Catalan. Close examination of these documents using theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics suggests that both parties employed the vernacular to augment the impact of their invective messages. Defiance letters already transmitted a verbal attack when delivered in the high-prestige language (Latin). These were declarations of war in which vassals disavowed their lords and reproached them with accusations and threats or vice versa. Transmitting them in the spoken, lower-prestige register (Catalan), however, amplified their effect by providing an unexpected break in protocol. It allowed the feuding parties to aggravate their threats and accusations by inflicting a blow in decorum alongside their declarations of war. Once their conflict ended, both parties switched back to writing to each other in Latin to signal a return to normality.

Dante’s Matelda, his guide through his Earthly Paradise, has been a source of perplexity for Dante scholars. This study summarizes discussions surrounding Matelda’s identity, concluding that the personage Dante most likely intended was Queen and Saint Matilda of Saxony, progenitor of the German line of Roman emperors, an identification that has never been fully explored. The contextual analysis supporting this identification examines Dante’s prefigurations of Matelda, his description of Matelda and her surroundings, and the many references to imperial, founding, and ruling women and mothers in Dante’s writings. Further supporting this identification is Dante’s concern for worldly justice and a revived empire that integrates the final cantos of Purgatorio with concerns in his Monarchia. The article then analyzes the manuscript traditions exalting Queen Matilda that Dante may have encountered; it concludes by arguing for consideration of the literal and figurative Matelda within the context of Dante’s imperial politics and dreams of justice.

This article discusses aspects of interactions between image and frame in the context of medieval devotional images. In the later Middle Ages the mimetic strategies to convey the figure’s presence in the image were complemented by pieces of bones inserted into the frame. I argue that this practice belongs to a longer medieval tradition of frameworks, in which different kinds of references and types of materials were developed to turn the frame into a central site of meaning. As a depository for relics in the realm of the cult image, the frame intensified the presence of the image by counterposing its strategies of mimesis against the relic’s immanent material traces. This phenomenon, however, fused what otherwise would have been distinct entities of image and relic, which was regarded as a serious problem in the context of image veneration. I show that an entirely different type of frame, one that worked with the inclusion of text, addressed precisely this problem. Here the frame addressed the artificial nature of the representation with the aim of creating distance between viewer and image.

This article examines the background and recruiting mechanisms of horsemen from the County of Loon who fought for the duke of Brabant at the battle of Baesweiler, 22 August 1371. It argues that socioeconomic incentives had a major role in fourteenth-century military recruitment and that the service of these men can be studied as a form of labor. The County of Loon became involved in the duke’s war effort through recruitment at different levels in which noblemen mobilized their relatives, friends and retainers. Mounted military service remained strongly associated with noble status, resulting in every man able to equip himself as a heavy cavalryman with two horses, a man-at-arms, being considered as noble to some degree. The article contextualizes the presence of these warriors within a larger spectrum of military service opportunities, and argues that chivalric ideals and military service as a form of labor are complementary.

The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Secretum secretorum uses essentially literary techniques to impersonate the voice of Aristotle writing to Alexander the Great about political, medical, and occult topics. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis borrows the theme of Aristotle’s counsel to Alexander in Book Seven, and its first version is addressed to Richard II, suggesting parallels between Gower and Aristotle as counselors to kings. The comparison of the two texts demonstrates that unlike the Secretum, the Confessio Amantis takes pains to treat Aristotle as a textual rather than embodied authority, displacing the Secretum’s concerns with the body and with occult knowledge onto the figure of Alexander’s biological father and tutor Nectanabus. While Gower does not impersonate Aristotle, he uses many of the Secretum’s techniques as he moves between his various literary personae in the poem, culminating in his return to the embodied and more selfaware character named John Gower.

An important intellectual problem raised for Europeans by the discovery of the New World was how those lands had been populated if all humans descended from Adam and Eve. One theory was based on an ancient Greek text which claimed that the Carthaginians discovered a large island in the Atlantic. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was believed to be the first (in 1535) to suggest that this passage showed that the New World had been discovered in antiquity. In fact this theory was proposed about eight years earlier in anonymous annotations in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. I suggest that the theory was transmitted from the annotator to Oviedo by way of Willibald Pirckheimer’s Germaniae explicatio (1530, 1532). The annotator seems to have been the first to have proposed the Carthaginian origin for the native peoples of the New World, and indeed the first to propose any theory to account for their presence.

Amongst the classicized monuments erected in honor of the Entry of Archduke Albert of Austria and the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia into the city of Antwerp in 1599, was the Fornix Hermathenae, a simple canopy-like structure. Yet, Johannes Bochius, designer of the Entry and author of the book that described the event and its monuments, defined it as “small in size, [but] extensive in its argument.” This article aims to show that Bochius’s design choice is pertinent to the analysis of this monument, as it was intended to differentiate it from the other monuments in the Entry, and to convey Antwerp’s demands regarding Spain’s economic policy for Belgium, and specifically for the city itself. Accordingly, the Fornix Hermathenae reflects Bochius’s search for a way to navigate between two tides: the rising new Mercantilist-centralist practices of the Spanish Crown, and the old scholastic ways, which were more in line with Antwerp’s particular need for autonomy and economic revival.