Viator

Most surviving texts from late antique and medieval Christianity reveal a profound preoccupation with asceticism. Many authors viewed their literary work as an ascetic discipline in its own right, and some texts were composed specifically to be used in conjunction with the performance of an ascetic practice. This paper centers on two such texts, written in different languages, centuries, and ascetic contexts, but bearing the similarity that they were both written to be used while performing vigil or keeping watch. The first are hymns (madrāše) of the fourth-century Syriac author Ephrem of Nisibis (d. 373). Seven of these are preserved only in Armenian, and bear the superscript Գիշերոյ կցուրդ (Gišeroy kc‘urd, "Hymn of the night"). There are other hymns written for vigil in Ephrem's extant Syriac corpus. The second is the Մատեան Ողբերգութեան (Matean Ołbergut‘ean, Book of Lamentation) of the tenth-century Armenian author Gregory of Narek (Grigor Narekac‘i, ca. 945-1003), intended for the private, solitary watching of a medieval monk. I will focus in on the nexus between text and performative context, first illuminating the particular ascetic environment each author presupposed, before showing how our understanding of these texts is enriched when read with their ascetic, performative context in the background.

Late medieval vernacular legendaries, such as the South English Legendary and the Gilte Legende, include a much smaller number of northern English saints' lives than those from the Midlands and South. This essay explores the lives of those northern saints from the "Lindisfarne-Durham" cluster that have been selected for transposition into these vernacular collections-Oswald, Cuthbert and Ninian-in order to ascertain to what extent they retain markers of northern English identity. In each case, the life of the saint in question is considered in relation to its major Latin sources in order to map changes in emphasis, and in each case, the essay demonstrates that the saint has been subjected to a geo-political pull, either north over the border into Scotland, or south into Yorkshire and the Midlands. These centrifugal pulls undermine Northumbria and Durham as meaningful northern polities, and erode the strong image of northern saintly identity first created by Bede in his Historia ecclesiastica.

The letter collection of Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne, is preserved in a unique but badly damaged manuscript dating from the third quarter of the ninth century. This manuscript was most probably copied out in St. Bavo's Abbey in Ghent between 853/60 and 879, though contrary to the general assumption, the letter collection itself was not compiled at St. Bavo's. In this paper, I argue that the collection probably originated as a letter-formulary in Seligenstadt, where Einhard spent the last years of his life. The core of the collection (letters 1-54 in the manuscript) appears to have been assembled around 834 or 835, possibly by Ratleik, who served Einhard as notary from 827 at the latest. This would explain why most of the letters in the collection date from the period after 828. In Einhard's last years, several more of his letters were added to the collection (letters 55-64). Shortly after Einhard's death (840), a copy of this collection was sent to St. Bavo's, where a number of letters that were neither sent by nor addressed to Einhard were added (letters 65-70). In the third quarter of the ninth century, this manuscript served as a model for the extant copy, which is probably to some degree selective. I also argue that, essentially, Einhard's letters owe their survival to their potential to be used as models for practical correspondence. As the letters are, in fact, anonymous (Einhard's name is systematically abbreviated to its initial letter), they were not assembled as a letter collection of the "great Einhard," but as a collection of epistolary models. A comparison with Alcuin and his letter collections shows that in the Carolingian period, Einhard had neither the authority nor the reputation of his contemporary.

In the early years of the Gregorian Reform, Peter Damian composed a letter to the newly enthroned Pope Leo IX. Its subject was the issue of sexual immorality amongst the clergy of the church- though not on the question of clerical marriage, which may be expected, but instead on the issue of sodomy. This letter, often titled the Liber Gomorrhianus, was the first dedicated treatment of the subject in the history of the church. Damian advocated for a broadening of the definition of sodomy to include all samesex acts as well as masturbation (a schema already partially begun by Burchard of Worms several decades before), and argued that any clergyman who committed such deeds ought to be removed from office. Utilizing twenty separate canons on the topic of sodomy or related topics in nearly thirty different collections from Regino of Prüm to Gratian, the influence of Damian's ideas is examined herein. Did his new approach to sodomy have precedents in former canonical collections-and did any of the canonists after Damian utilize his ideas? After an analysis of these canons, it seems clear that Damian had little impact on the canonists' views on the subject of sodomy, despite his virulent opposition to the practice. Instead, the canonists continue mostly unaltered with the tradition of those canonists who came before Damian's Liber.

This article explores why Herbert of Bosham (d. ca. 1194) claimed that writing history and expressing emotion were inherently incompatible activities. Focusing on the Historia that Bosham wrote (ca. 1184-ca. 1189) about the life and death of his close friend, Thomas Becket, I begin by situating Bosham's claim within the wider framework of history-writing's disavowal of the emotions. I then go on to unpack Bosham's definition of historia as a literary genre and to explain his understanding of emotional expression, using the frameworks of medieval grammar, rhetoric, and biblical exegesis to do so. While Bosham understood history-writing as a genre policed by strict "laws," I argue, he understood the emotions as inherently lawless-and thus unable to be contained by the normal rules of discourse. This means that when Bosham periodically abandoned the chronological progression that normative historical writing demanded, he was not just being the poor historian that modern scholarship has often made him out to be. Rather, he was being daringly experimental, quite deliberately using rhetoric's most emotional techniques (especially amplificatio, apostrophe, and enargaeia) in order to give his Historia a lyrical complexion. I argue here that the Historia's alternation between lyrical stasis and historiographical progression was both personal and political. On the one hand, it mirrored Bosham's own alternation between mourning and consolation. On the other, by refusing the demands of narrative progress, the Historia refuses to close the Becket conflict down and to bring it safely to a conclusion.

The history and historiography of medieval Poland present an important tension between two very different understandings of the power of the ruler-duke, occasionally king, comprising the Piast dynasty. On the one hand, the ruler is understood as the central, ubiquitous, indeed indispensable actor, in all kinds of important transactions. On the other, he appears severely limited in his capacities across that same range of transactions. This is the paradox of Piast power. The article seeks to resolve, or at least reduce, that paradox by confronting several primary sources concerned with the dichotomy. The framing source is the Henryków Book, whose author, Abbot Peter, presents the tension explicitly within a short segment of the dynasty. Through close comparison and contrast between the dukes comprising that segment, Peter generates several criteria of strong, successful, or good exercise of power, and of their negative opposites. Peter's criteria resonate with the diplomatic output issued by the same group of dukes. Using several attributes of the diplomas-their quantitative output, the recruitment of witnesses, family commemoration, and repeated attention to youthfulness as a factor of flawed or weak rule-the article seeks to explain why and how specific rulers in this dynastic segment were perceived-by one another, their contemporaries, successors, and ultimately historians-as strong, effective, good, or otherwise. The result offers one explanation of the tension between the two clashing understandings, and so reduces the paradox.

In an article from 2010, Judy Quinn argues that the metaphor of "liquid knowledge" in eddic poetry refers to the liquidity of the oral society where the eddic poetry was composed and transmitted. The aim of the present article is to expand on and nuance this interpretation based on two main factors: (1) the poetry is known to us from manuscripts produced in a highly evolved literate culture, and (2) the commonness of the metaphor linking ingestion and digestion, on the one hand, and cognitive transformation, on the other, in medieval Christian texts and rituals. This evidence suggests that the metaphor of drinking and eating knowledge has a great degree of plasticity and may refer both to the liquidity of an oral culture and to theological paradigms in medieval Christian literate culture. This has implications for our understanding of the Old Norse literary system in general and for attitudes to knowledge in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Old Norse culture.

This article traces the development of grammar schools in Paris, including their location and teachers, from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. It looks at conflicts over the right to appoint and license teachers, the oversight authority of the cantor of Notre-Dame, the role of other agents, such as burghers, parish priests, the chancellor, and university masters, and the emergence of a guild of teachers. Some attention is given to the development of private teaching and parish schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to provide a background for later developments.

This article proposes a fresh interpretation of Petrarch's Song of Glory (RVF 119) through the canzone's significant placement after the Anniversary Series of sonnets (RVF 107-118), its link to the Secretum, and, above all, Petrarch's engagement with Stoic philosophy found throughout these poems which ultimately reinforces the poet's critical stance toward glory especially in this canzone. Petrarch composed the Song of Glory, as well as the Anniversary Series, to represent failure within a Stoic ideology and, as a result, this apparent shortcoming also introduces significant questions concerning the humanist program and the experiential limits of imitation itself. Petrarch viewed Stoicism as a moral philosophy to emulate, accentuating the ethical dimension inherent in the value attributed by humanists to imitating classical texts; but in the end the Secretum presents Stoic goals as potentially unattainable objects of desire tantamount to the poet's pursuit of fleeting objectives such as security, tranquility, virtue, and glory. What ultimately emerges in these compelling texts, all linked to Petrarch's year of crisis (1342-1343), is a crucial intersection where the poet confronts his understanding of glory by questioning its meaning.

This article examines the numerous late medieval manuscripts of the Old Norse Konungs skuggsjá [The King's Mirror], which have been critically neglected. It analyses the manuscripts' physical aspects (size, layout, decorations, marginalia), provenance, and socio-historical and literary context, and the relationship between these features. Although Konungs skuggsjá is usually discussed in a thirteenth-century Norwegian and royal context, the article shows that the treatise was a popular text in Iceland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that it is preserved in several prestigous manuscripts which were once impressive codices. Three books belonging to this group are examined in more detail, and the article argues that they provide tantalising insights into what kind of people read the text-namely aristocrats, primarily women, in Northern Iceland-and its function in their cultural sphere. On one hand, the text and its presence in an élite manuscript expressed one family's political and social identity. On the other hand, manuscript provenance, marginalia, and the degree of wear show that the text was used as an educational tool for moral and spiritual instruction in the early education of children, and women could also have read it for their own intellectual enjoyment.

This article argues that the late-medieval Catalan-Aragonese kings and their viceroys relied on record-keeping as a practical means of government, in essence for controlling the Kingdom of Sicily from a distance. More broadly, books, registers, and rolls are to be considered as crucial instruments through which late-medieval governments exercised their rule over complex political and social systems and were kept informed about their dominions' affairs. It is thus crucial to make those practical written tools into primary objects of research. By focusing on the "registers" of the royal chancery of the Kingdom of Sicily, this study examines the procedure for producing letters and privileges in connection to the establishment of a viceregal system; the strategies the Sicilian chancery staff adopted for recording documents, and the emergence of a method based on multiple registrations; the technical innovations they introduced for managing an increasing amount of information and facilitating its retrieval. Moreover, this study shows that the increasing attention of authorities towards record-keeping also generated a political conflict with Sicilian society, to the extent that the local parliament pursued the abolition of the registers of the royal chancery.

A number of medieval and early modern accounts by western pilgrims report an encounter with the Eternal Jew in Jerusalem. In examining these hitherto unexplored accounts, this paper adds a new angle to the well-documented literary and artistic presence of the eternally wandering Jew in European history. The paper presents evidence for the eastern Mediterranean origins of the legend of the Wandering Jew and suggests that the Jerusalemite context of the legend adds unique attributes that produce a rich and ambiguous cultural construct. To the Christian map of Jerusalem, a space laden with scriptural memories and symbolic paradoxes of presence and absence, the Jew's figure adds yet another layer to the enduring symbolism of the physical existence of Christ in Jerusalem and a tangible promise for his Second Coming at the End of Days.