Viator

Historians have conventionally represented Ottonian expansion across the Elbe-Saale as a totalizing conquest of the area up to the Oder River and the Baltic shore, lasting until a Slavic revolt in 983. This essay investigates narrative sources, material culture, and charter evidence to suggest a new geography of Ottonian expansion. It argues that, while much of the traditional model holds true for the southern inland portion of the area between the Elbe and the Oder, in the northern area defined by the reach of the Baltic watershed, local Slavic structures of rule remained, and the Ottonian presence was only felt through tributary arrangements if at a ll. The p aper suggests a reevaluation of the beginnings of German incursion into Slavic territory.

Few studies have explored news in the medieval world. This lack of research, combined with differences in the available source material, has led scholars of early modern and modern news to assume that news in the Middle Ages was a significantly different phenomenon. This essay challenges this idea by offering a new methodology for investigating medieval news. It proposes a framework for the identification of medieval news texts and shows how these texts should be understood alongside other sources and in the context of contemporary communications. The potential of this approach is demonstrated through a case study of the dissemination of three related international news stories from 1187: the defeat of Christian forces at Hattin on 4 July, the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin on 2 October, and the launch of the Third Crusade on 29 October. It concludes by offering some general observations on news in this period and emphasizing the potential for further research in this area.

This article presents the first forensic source criticism of the papal encyclical that launched the Third Crusade, Audita tremendi (1187/1188); it makes four main arguments. First, its core empirical contribution is to demonstrate textual variation across the four issues of the letter. Second, it engages with the debate on whether the crusading movement existed in an institutional form in the twelfth century by challenging the interpretation that the reissue of Audita tremendi and similar papal documents was the result of uninspired "plagiarism." Third, it offers a new reconstruction of the immediate context of the issue of the document and argues that, rather than being the product of a long period of careful composition, it was issued as a hurried response to the arrival of the news from Hattin. Fourth, it reconsiders the role of the encyclical in the call for the Third Crusade and contends that the papacy was focused not on the promotion of the military expedition but on the launch of an immediate liturgical campaign of communal repentance. Additionally, the article prints comparative transcriptions of the four issues as an appendix, three of which are published here for the first time.

The following article considers the intellectual context of Brut y Brenhinedd ("The History of the Kings"), the collective title given to the Middle Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae). It begins with an overview of the various versions of Brut y Brenhinedd as an entry point for non-specialists into the subject. It positions the reception of Geoffrey's Latin text in the intellectual culture of medieval Wales as a precursor to the translation of the text into the Welsh language, demonstrating that the interpretation of Geoffrey's history by Welsh scholars—by way of marginal glossing, layers of commentary, and extensive rewriting—was an interpretive activity that began with Latin copies of the text, prior to and as translation into Welsh occurred. It shows that Latinate literary culture in medieval Wales is more dynamic, learned, and closely linked to Welsh vernacular literature than often acknowledged.

The article examines thirteenth-century Icelandic conceptions of female suicide and ideas about their causes and motives by conducting a case study of a saga figure called Brynhildr, who commits suicide. The story of Brynhildr is told in several medieval Icelandic sources: in the mytho-heroic legendary saga (fornaldarsaga) Völsunga saga, Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda. The story of Brynhildr in these sources offers fruitful material for the study of the history of suicide, since the northern version in question differs from the southern version of the Brynhildr legend that was known especially in medieval Germany, in which Brynhildr does not kill herself. In this study, the causes and background factors of Brynhildr's suicide and her motives for her deed, which are described and mentioned in the sources, represent possibilities for female behavior that were part of the mental toolbox of medieval Icelanders. It is argued that the Icelandic audience believed some women committed suicide to protect or restore their honor, or to take revenge, and that such an act required determination, capability to make rational choices, and sense of responsibility. The act could also be seen as a manifestation of power and authority: the woman decided herself when her life would end. However, Brynhildr's death represents only one possible type of female suicide, and not all were expected to be the same. Committing such a preconceived self-killing as Brynhildr's required an especially strong will. Most women, who were usually maintained by men, were thought not to possess such might and strength.

This essay argues that forms and practices of communal urban government functioned as an institutional framework for the legitimization of imperial authority throughout the cities of central Italy during the first half of the fourteenth century. Historians have typically understood the use of the title of imperial vicar in Italy during the reigns of Emperor Henry VII and Ludwig IV as a turning point for the development of seignorial regimes in the cities of northern and central Italy. In contrast, this essay emphasizes the processes of negotiations between the urban elites of Todi and Emperor Ludwig IV of Bavaria in order to show how competing groups within the city employed complex and often contradictory forms and discourses of political authority in their relations with supra-urban systems of authority, like the papacy and the empire. Drawing from mostly unpublished archival material such as official correspondence, Riformanze, and inquisition records, this paper shows how the appointment of Emperor Ludwig IV as podestà and the acceptance of an imperial vicar in his stead was the result of a concerted effort to preserve the monopoly that Todi's urban elites exercised on municipal institutions. In so doing, this essay contributes to recent debates about the development of urban seignorial regimes throughout Italy, arguing that the establishment of imperial vicariates was not an attempt to thwart municipal institutions but that those institutions maintained a central role in the processes of political legitimation.

This article brings to light a fourteenth-century French translation, previously unknown to scholarship, of the most important work by the Carthusian prioress Margaret of Oingt, her Franco-Provençal Speculum. The late-fourteenth-century manuscript preserving this French rendering of Margaret's mystical visions is described, and the circumstances of its production and potential audience considered. The medieval French Speculum is then compared to the original Franco-Provençal and to the medieval Occitan and early modern French translations. Finally, the medieval French text, which in some cases provides better readings than the surviving medieval copy of the Franco-Provençal, is edited for the first time.

The late fifteenth-century Low Countries were the site of radical attempts to rethink chronological questions, including the first printed horizontal timeline and a number of innovative harmonizations of the Gospel accounts of Christ's life. This article situates these attempts closely within the reform movements of the period, arguing for a history of chronology connected to the social and cultural worlds of the communities who produced and read them. More particularly, through close historicized readings of Werner Rolewinck's Fasciculus temporum, and Peter de Rivo's Monotesseron of the Gospels, alongside its transmission to and adaptation within a prominent reforming Augustinian house, the Rood Klooster near Brussels, this article shows how these often technical texts could be bound up with the devotional practices of the period. Devout chronology was constructed and read within a liturgical frame, in a milieu which promoted devotional practices of spiritual ascent and intellective vision through comprehensive engagements with time.

The text discusses four maces of the University of Cracow, the second oldest university in Central Europe, founded in 1364. The maces are singular with regard to their function, since only the oldest one (c. 1403–1416) was made especially for the university. The other three—originally cardinal's maces, associated with the bishops of Cracow who were ex officio chancellors of Cracow University, namely the cardinals: Zbigniew Oleśnicki (1389–1455), Frederick Jagiellonian (1468–1503), and Bernard Maciejowski (1548–1608)—were donated by the cardinals to the university, and are, in all likelihood, the oldest surviving insignia of this kind in Europe. The role of the Cracow cardinals' maces as signs and guardians of memory about the great prelates of the local Church is as important as is their unique function and unparalleled craftsmanship.

In 1420, Florence and Milan signed a peace agreement intended to mend their relationship and assure a long period of tranquility. The promises therein, however, were not kept very long. The stipulation of this treaty is useful for debating some issues concerning state territoriality, such as the hazy question of the spheres of influence. This question inevitably involves the problem of the territoriality of political powers. Territoriality is a multiform term, and it is precisely in this plurality of forms that one can wonder if those spheres of influence could be interpreted as one of those forms. By means of an interdisciplinary approach, this essay helps clarify the conception and definition of spheres of influence, leading to a better appreciation of their territorial ambiguity and their concrete political gambles. A sphere of influence appears to be the product and the expression of a territorial otherness, and the war between Florence and Filippo Maria Visconti provides a good example by which to demonstrate this argument.

This paper analyzes Venetian involvement in Latin Christian pilgrimage to Palestine in the final decades of the Mamluk Sultanate (c. 1480–1517). It draws upon pilgrim narratives by Venetians, other Italians, and transalpine authors, as well as Venetian legislation concerned with the transportation of pilgrims to the Holy Land held at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASVe), in particular the Ufficiali al Cattaver and Senato, Deliberazioni Mar. What follows is a survey of various Christian-Muslim material exchanges involved in pilgrimage in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, together with the most salient problems arising from those transactions. The article argues for the importance of cross-cultural material exchanges in facilitating interactions between Muslim authorities and Christian travelers in the eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the sixteenth century. Having highlighted the main challenges and concerns faced by these interlinked groups, it finds evidence of extortion and exploitation perpetrated upon the pilgrims by Venetians and Mamluks alike, but at the same time it also considers a few of the means by which the travelers could evade conflict and continue on their journeys.

This article investigates the early manuscript diffusion of the De spiritu et anima, widely circulated in the thirteenth century and beyond as a work of Augustine, but whose authorship has been much disputed. Building on the research of Norpoth (1924) into different versions of DSA, it compares the treatise to the De anima of Isaac of Stella, addressed to Alcher of Clairvaux, arguing that initially it circulated in a Cistercian context, before being studied in a scholastic milieu as a work of Augustine. It presents evidence supporting Alcher's authorship of DSA, as signalled by the title Liber Alcheri de anima given in Tissier's edition of 1664, likely to be based on a manuscript from Stella. It presents DSA as a text that combines Augustinian themes with the Boethian arguments of Isaac about the soul in its Type 1 version, but subsequently expands into a Type 2 version (printed by Tissier) and a little-circulated Type 3 version, which emphasizes the theme of self-knowledge. In a university context, it provided a discussion of the soul quite distinct from that provided by Aristotle.