Viator

The Old English translation of Orosius’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem includes several additions, many of which bear on military deception. This article adopts a historical- philological approach to examine the descriptions of military stratagems in the Old English Orosius. Particularly, it focuses on surprise attacks and considers the modification of specific details and the translator’s lexical choices, thereby interrogating the translator’s stance on military trickery. The Old English translator criticizes the use of surprise attacks that take place at night or after oath-taking, as these tactics were typically associated with Viking raiders. He modifies the episodes of Hercules and Camillus, linking their night attacks with cowardice. In his modification, night attacks are acceptable only for defensive purposes and in numerically disproportionate situations. Additionally, by altering the accounts of Sergius Galba and Agathocles, the translator correlates their uses of military trickery following oaths with untrustworthiness and the eventual collapse of authority.

This article analyzes the twelfth-century verse life of the “harlot saint” Thais written by the bishop and auctor Marbod of Rennes, arguing that it should be understood as an intervention into a particular ecclesiastical context of Marbod’s episcopacy: the rise in penitential and eremitic or reclusive movements and the widespread presence of women, including those identified as meretrices or harlots, in these new communities. It examines the evidence for Marbod’s involvement in responding to and shaping religious practice in this context, and the broader interest in his works in female moral and spiritual life, including several of his episcopal letters and two poems in the Liber decem capitulorum. It then argues that Marbod’s life of Thais adjusted and refocused its immediate source (a redaction of the prose version) to highlight three themes: the economic dimension of Thais’s pre-conversion life, Thais’s agency in her penitential practice, and the necessity of wise pastoral conduct in relationships between female penitents and male spiritual directors.

This article examines select passages from the twelfth-century Vézelay Chronicle that may shed light on the identity of the otherwise unknown “Godefroiz de Leigni,” the continuator of Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier de la Charrette. The possible identification of this “Godefroiz” intersects questions that have long captivated both readers and scholars of the Charrette, including the historicity of its authors, the text’s narrative structure, the cultural politics of Marie de Champagne’s patronage, and the broader dynamics of medieval literary creation and continuations. The first part of the article traces the itinerant activities of “Gaudefredus de Latiniaco,” a renegade monk and skillful orator from Lagny-sur-Marne. The second part examines the plausibility that this former monk of Vézelay later completed the Charrette, drawing on evidence from his clerical status, rhetorical ability, connections to Marie de Champagne’s intellectual circles, and Vézelay’s literary milieu. It also explores the protean nature of the continuation, which merges seamlessly with Chrétien’s voice and complicates traditional notions of medieval authorship.

This article examines the representation of religious and spiritual conversion in BnF Français 375 through the focal points of Robert d’Orbigny’s Conte de Floire et Blanchefleur and Gautier de Coincy’s Comment Theophilus vint a penitence. These Old French texts are respectively shaped by the interfaith conversion of a pagan-Muslim prince, Floire, to Christianity, and the intrafaith deconversion and reconversion of the cleric Theophilus. It is argued that conversion operates at a sustained thematic and narrative level in these works through the dynamics of the individual versus the group, as well as Floire’s and Theophilus’s allegorical journeys. The multiplicity of these conceptualizations demonstrates that religious and spiritual change was often portrayed as an ongoing process in medieval literature, rather than only occurring in temporally fixed moments, as is commonly assumed. This paper also foregrounds the importance of Robert’s and Gautier’s shared codicological setting, analyzing the unique dialogue found in BnF Français 375 between discrete textual depictions of conversion and broader interfaith and intrafaith transitions across the manuscript’s Latin and vernacular works. As a result, conversion is shown to be a productive heuristic category for understanding the organization of multi-text and multi-genre medieval manuscripts.

Philippe de Novare’s .iiij. tenz d’aage d’ome (ca. 1264) is a treatise on the Ages of Man that stands out not only for its originality but also for the ways in which it performs an unusually intersubjective dynamics of aging. In this text where structural and rhetorical features are persistently looking forward, backward, and askew, Philippe emphasizes intergenerational interdependence: individuals of different age are dependent on each other, and one is effectively in constant negotiation with one’s older and younger selves. Crucially, this interdependence also manifests itself differently for men and women of different social classes. As we suggest through close textual analysis and dialogue with medieval learned culture, as well as queer theory, disability studies, and life course theory, Philippe’s text thus exposes the multiple and variegated temporal modes that, perhaps counterintuitively, aging implicates. As importantly, it draws attention to the precarity of this temporal economy. Indeed, while the .iiij. tenz illustrates that a significantly antilinear conception of aging is not necessarily subversive, it also demonstrates how normative conceptions of aging nonetheless mobilize a complex network of temporal relations that is constantly flirting with its own unraveling. We argue that while Philippe’s treatise ostensibly sets out to define each age in a didactic, orderly mode, it complexly embraces the heterogeneous, unruly temporalities of aging in manners that underscore how nonlinear elements can both sustain and threaten normative temporal schemes

The Grand Mashtotsʻ of Sis is a little-studied early fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript containing the detailed descriptions of several post-coronation rituals, which were meant to be an integral part of the royal inauguration ceremonies in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375). In the appendix to this article, I have offered the first English translation of that text, while discussing the textual tradition of the Cilician coronation ordo and its Mediterranean models in the first part of the article. The next section analyzes the courtly etiquettes and ceremonial roles ascribed to various officials of rank, which greatly reveal the administrative mechanisms through which the state apparatus functioned in Cilician Armenia. Orchestrated by the sovereign, these symbolically charged rituals reflect the hierarchical and reciprocal relationship between the principal representatives of the body politic. By focusing on the outdoor procession, the royal banquet, and the gift-giving ceremony, the article demonstrates how the kings and queens of this northeastern Mediterranean state made use of their ceremonial presence for consolidating political power and what the intended implications of these aesthetic enactments were in the long and ambiguous process of governance.

Compiled from two earlier chronicles, the Chronicle of Lanercost (ca. 1346) is a prime source of information on the Wars of Scottish Independence. The first part of the chronicle (1201– 97), written by Richard of Durham, contains numerous exempla designed to entertain as well as edify. While the exemplum concerning the revenant of an excommunicated monk from Paisley Abbey that terrorized the household of Sir Duncan de Insula, killing his son, is well-known in modern scholarship on the supernatural, its exact critical function is yet to be fully explored. The aim of this article, then, is to analyze the literary function and wider thematic relevance of this undead encounter. I argue that the ontological transgressions of the dead monk’s reappearance, the unstable nature of his postmortem body, and the eventual death of Sir Duncan’s son speak to the spiritual and social crises caused by sexual transgression. Taking into account the specific narrative placement of the exemplum, I further argue that the story’s allusions to sodomy, sexual sin, and the breakdown of natural order allegorize the moral and political fallout from the Scottish repudiation of the English crown in 1295.

This article examines early uses of paper in Iceland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and late uses of parchment and palimpsests in the seventeenth century, arguing that rather than being in competition for dominance, parchment and paper coexisted for centuries. Paper in fifteenth-century Iceland was rare and difficult to source, being available only to a narrow segment of the population with connections outside the island. Pragmatic literacy drove an increase in paper use in the sixteenth century among the upper echelons of society, and a growing volume of paper was imported for the printing press, supporting the post-Reformation expansion of religious book ownership in the late sixteenth century. However, Icelandic patrons and scribes were slow to adopt paper as a potential replacement for high-status parchment manuscripts. Writing-quality paper was present in Iceland for well over a century before having a significant impact on manuscript culture. By the early seventeenth century, paper had become part of the material culture of most, if not all, strata of society. Parchment was, however, still used for some types of manuscripts, particularly showpiece manuscripts, copies of the law code Jónsbók, and perpetual calendars. A correlation thus exists between the content and function of a manuscript and the writing surface. Unusually, little evidence exists for deliberate mixing of paper and parchment as writing surfaces in book production, in contrast to the common fifteenth-century practice in mainland Europe of constructing mixed-material quires. Despite the long coexistence of paper and parchment in Iceland, one rarely finds the two materials bound together except as distinct codicological units combined by later users.

This article examines the use of political analogies to the physical body employed by the quintessential Northern humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. While medical metaphors are found across the vast range of his writings, he stands at a distance from his medieval predecessors and most of his Renaissance contemporaries, who also relied on bodily imagery for their conceptions of political order. Rather, Erasmus did not subscribe to a single model of medicine but drew indiscriminately from the three main schools of physiological science: Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Galenism. Specifically, I concentrate on Erasmus’s handling of three central features of conventional medieval and Renaissance medical metaphors for politics: (1) the location of the seat of the body’s primary governing force; (2) the relationship between the body and the soul; and (3) the functional organization of the members of the body, especially in connection with the prince.

Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales (1594–1612), was the first British figure to be the subject of widespread hope as the “Lion of the North,” a Protestant version of the Last Emperor figure. As such, he would reform the Church and destroy the double Antichrists of evangelical apocalypticism— the pope and the Turks—and thereby usher in a reformed millennium. However, he died on November 6, 1612, at the age of eighteen, but the hopes he had engendered did not die with him. This essay will document the survival of the idea of a Protestant Last Emperor in British eschatology by examining the support for three men who were identified as the “heirs” of the prophetic hopes that had once surrounded Henry: Frederick V (1596–1632), Charles I (1600– 1649), and Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632).