Europa Sacra
Crusader Rhetoric and the Infancy Cycles on Medieval Baptismal Fonts in the Baltic Region
This is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis to demonstrate that the representation of Infancy cycles on twelfth-and-thirteenth-century baptismal fonts was primarily a northern predilection in the Latin West directly influenced by the contemporary military campaigns. The Infantia Christi Corpus a collection of approximately one-hundred-and-fifty fonts verifies how the Danish and Gotland workshops modified and augmented biblical history to reflect the prevailing crusader ideology and rhetoric that dominated life during the Valdemarian era in the Baltic region. The artisans constructed the pictorial programs according to the readings of the Mass for the feast days in the seasons of Advent Christmas and Epiphanytide. The political ambitions of the northern leaders and the Church to create a Land of St. Peter in the Baltic region strategically influenced the integration of Holy Land motifs warrior saints militia Christi and martyrdom in the Infancy cycles to justify the escalating northern conquests.
Neither before nor after in the history of baptismal fonts have so many been ornamented with the Infancy cycle in elaborate pictorial programs. A brief revival of elaborate Infancy cycles occurs on the fourteenth and fifteenth century fonts commissioned for sites previously located in the Christian borderlands east of the Elbe River with the rise of the Baltic military orders and the advancement of the Church authority. This extraordinary study integrates theological liturgical historical and political developments broadening our understanding of what constituted northern crusader art in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Careers and Opportunities at the Roman Curia, 1300–1500
A Socio-Economic History of Papal Administration
Brigide Schwarz (1940–2019) a leading German historian of the Renaissance papacy is presented here for the first time in a dossier of ten previously untranslated scholarly studies.
The volume brings the mechanisms of late medieval career building back to life. Success among churchmen was measured in access to ever more lucrative ecclesiastical endowments (or benefices). As the fifteenth century progressed their treatment assumed highly monetized and abstract dimensions. Guided by Dr Schwarz economic historians can discern many transactions that foreshadow the asset management of present-day Wall Street.
From the 1400s administrative positions at the papal court (or Curia) were increasingly auctioned off. This created a marketplace for bidders expecting returns by way of ‘creative’ fee regulations or through the cornering of services in monopolies.
Only recently scholarship has begun to question older depictions of the late medieval Church as one of decay and moral corruption. Dr Schwarz points to the ‘modernity’ of the fiscal arrangements which nation states like France soon copied as an efficient model of public financing.
The Heresy of the Brothers, a Heterodox Community in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Around the mid-sixteenth century one of the largest Italian heterodox communities developed in Modena: the community of ‘Brothers’. At the beginning of the century a flourishing humanistic tradition had inspired protests against the authority of the Church and had led many of the city’s prominent figures to sympathize with Luther and the Reformation. Over the following decades such positions became more extreme: most of the ‘Brothers’ held radical convictions ranging from belief in predestination to contestation of the Antichrist pope. In some cases the ‘Brothers’ even went so far as to deny the value of baptism.
This heterodox community in Modena created a hidden network for the free expression of its reformed faith. Within twenty years however the election of Pope Pius V (1566-1572) and the consolidation of the Holy Office led to a harsh campaign to disperse dissenters in the city. Despite the protection of illustrious members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy the bishops of Modena and the dukes of Ferrara the Holy Office succeeded in repressing the community. The history of the ‘Brothers’ of Modena therefore provides a case study for understanding how the Inquisition influenced the balance of religious Italy changing the face of the Peninsula forever.
Renaissance Religions
Modes and Meanings in History
Several decades of cultural and inter-disciplinary scholarship have yielded and continue to yield new insights into the diversity of religious experience in Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Revisionist approaches to humanism and humanists have led to a re-evaluation of the framing of belief; the boundaries between Christianity Judaism and Islam are seen to be more fluid and porous; a keen interest in devotion and materiality has lent new voice to 'subaltern' elements in society; sermon studies has emerged as a distinct discipline and a preacher's omissions are now understood to be often more telling than what was said; under the influence of the 'spatial turn' art and architectural history is generating new understandings of how belief and devotion translated into material culture; the emphasis in defining early modern Catholic culture and identity has moved from emphasizing reactions to Protestantism towards exploring roots and forms in fifteenth century reform movements; globalization mass migration and issues surrounding social inclusion have re-positioned our understanding of reform in the late medieval and early modern period. The essays in this volume reflect these historiographical and methodological developments and are organized according to four themes: Negotiating Boundaries Modelling Spirituality Sense and Emotion and Space and Form. This organization underscores how analysis of religious life clarifies the questions that are at the core of Renaissance studies today.
Eschatology in the Work of Jan Hus
This study provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of Hus’s ideas on the last things as they are presented in both his work and life. It examines the content and language of his works particularly his Latin sermons and correspondence from a literary-historical perspective. It explores general eschatology (Antichrist purgatory heaven and hell) as well as its intertwining with the Last Things that Jan Hus experienced personally in his struggle against Antichrist. Thus the reader will learn not only about Hus’s official ideas but also about his intimate thoughts contained in correspondence written during his exile and even as he was in prison awaiting death.
The book also presents Hus’s eschatology in the broader context of Church reform. It clarifies how Hus’s eschatology developed from its beginnings up to his death and takes into account the writings of other thinkers whose ideas are connected to Hus’s eschatology such as John Wycliffe Milíč of Kroměříž Matěj of Janov and Nicholas of Dresden. The book also features an introductory prolegomena on Hus’s life and work and early reform eschatology which describes not only relevant Czech influences on Hus’s eschatology (e.g. university theology social-political factors the Czech preaching tradition) but also European influences (e.g. Peter Lombard heterodox doctrines).
Authority and Power in the Medieval Church, c. 1000–c. 1500
While they often go hand-in-hand and the distinction between the two is frequently blurred authority and power are distinct concepts and abilities - this was a problem that the Church tussled with throughout the High and Late Middle Ages. Claims of authority efforts to have that authority recognized and the struggle to transform it into more tangible forms of power were defining factors of the medieval Church’s existence.
As the studies assembled here demonstrate claims to authority by members of the Church were often in inverse proportion to their actual power - a problematic paradox which resulted from the uneven and uncertain acceptance of ecclesiastical authority by lay powers and indeed fellow members of the ecclesia. The chapters of this book reveal how clerical claims to authority and power were frequently debated refined opposed and resisted in their expression and implementation. The clergy had to negotiate a complex landscape of overlapping and competing claims in pursuit of their rights. They waged these struggles in arenas that ranged from papal royal and imperial curiae through monastic houses law courts and parliaments urban religious communities and devotional networks to contact and conflict with the laity on the ground; the weapons deployed included art manuscripts dress letters petitions treatises legal claims legates and the physical arms of allied lay powers.
In an effort to further our understanding of this central aspect of ecclesiastical history this interdisciplinary volume which effects a broad temporal geographical and thematic sweep points the way to new avenues of research and new approaches to a traditional topic. It fuses historical methodologies with art history gender studies musicology and material culture and presents fresh insights into one of the most significant institutions of the medieval world.
Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy
The walls of early modern convents suggested the existence of absolute conditions that seldom existed in reality. While the built enclosure communicated the convent’s isolation from the world outside connections between women religious and individuals or groups outside their communities extended into and from these houses with each constituency exploiting these associations to serve its own aims.Likewise the walls conveyed the presence of a homogeneous and unified community where often differences in status power and other interests led to the development of internal alliances and factions.
Building on an upsurge of scholarly interest in convent networks that previously has not been focused in a single volume this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how and why such associations existed. The collection examines personal spatial and temporal networks that emerged in among and beyond convents in Italy during the early modern period. These ties were established cultivated or even rejected in a variety of ways that influenced nuns’ devotional lives their relationships with patrons and their cultural engagement and production.
These essays cover the time period before and after the Council of Trent permitting an analysis of convents’ responses to changing power dynamics both inside and outside the enclosure. The book also engages a broad geographical and cultural range with chapters focusing on the centres of Florence Venice and Rome the courts of Urbino Ferrara and Mantua and smaller cities across Northern Italy offering unprecedented insights into early modern Italian convent life and its varied forms and modes of expression.
Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages
The Contribution of the Hungarian Sources (c. 1270-c. 1530)
By the late Middle Ages mendicant spiritual confraternities had developed a poor reputation. Their spiritual status was ill-identified: somewhere between requests for intercession necrological commemoration and pious associations. In the hands of the mendicants they seemed to resemble what indulgences had supposedly become in the hands of the papacy: bait that was handed out to extort funds from the faithful while offering an apparently immediate access to Paradise. Thus like indulgences they seem to have been gradually emptied of their substance and denounced (even before Luther) as glaring evidence of the corruption of the Roman Church. Much recent scholarship has followed this negative portrait of spiritual confraternities — unless it has conflated them with other non-spiritual confraternities or indeed ignored them altogether.
This volume draws on the abundant number of letters of confraternity available from Hungarian sources in order to provide a more nuanced picture of mendicant spiritual confraternities. It sheds new light on the links between the mendicants and their supports among the laity and emphasises the broader significance of the confraternity movement in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.
Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World
Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman
Throughout his distinguished career at Vanderbilt and Yale Paul H. Freedman has established a reputation for pushing against and crossing perceived boundaries within history and within the historical discipline. His numerous works have consistently ventured into uncharted waters: from studies uncovering the hidden workings of papal bureaucracy and elite understandings of subaltern peasants to changing perceptions of exotic products and the world beyond Europe to the role modern American restaurants have played in taking cuisine in exciting new directions.
The fifteen essays collected in this volume have been written by Paul Freedman’s former students and closest colleagues to both honour his extraordinary achievements and to explore some of their implications for medieval and post-medieval European society and historical study. Together these studies assess and explore a range of different boundaries both tangible and theoretical: boundaries relating to law religion peasants historiography and food medicine and the exotic. While drawing important conclusions about their subjects the collected essays identify historical quandaries and possibilities to guide future research and study.
Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent
This volume honours F. W. (Bill) Kent (1942–2010) internationally renowned scholar of Renaissance Florence and founding editor of the Europa Sacra series. Kent belonged to an energetic generation of Australians who in the late 1960s tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city.
With his meticulous archival findings and contextual interpretations spanning a scholarly career of more than forty years Kent engaged with indeed drove the scholarly response to many of the issues that have shaped not just our current and emerging understanding of Florence and other urban centres of Italy but along with that a more nuanced view of the role of frontier towns and the countryside.
Interdisciplinary in scope and grounded in visual literary and archival materials the essays presented here explore a variety of facets of the society of Renaissance Italy confronting and extending themes that have been emerging in recent decades and exemplified by Kent’s work. These themes include the role of kinship and networks power and agency in Laurentian Florence gender ritual representation patronage spirituality and the generation and consumption of material culture.
Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World
Word, Deed, and Image
The eleven interdisciplinary essays that comprise this book complement and expand upon a significant body of literature on the history of the Franciscan and Dominican orders during the later Middle Ages and the early modern period. They elucidate and examine the ways in which mendicant friars established sustained and transformed their institutional identities and shaped the devotional experiences of the faithful to whom they ministered via verbal and visual culture. Taking primary texts and images as their point of departure these essays break new scholarly ground by revising previous assumptions regarding mendicant life and actions and analysing sites works of art and texts that either have been neglected in the existing literature or that have not been examined through the lens of current methodologies such as sermon studies ritual gender and cross-cultural interactions. Indeed the varied methods and subjects of these essays demonstrate there is still much to be learned about the mendicant orders and the ways and spaces in which they operated and presented themselves on the local regional and global stages.
Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe
On 5 December 1709 in Bologna Lucia Cremonini is accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her newborn son. This tragic episode exhumed from the depths of time is placed at the centre of an enthralling study by one of the leading scholars of modern history and the history of religious beliefs. During the course of a dramatic trial the crime is debated by representatives of religious philosophical moral and scientific culture all characteristic of the formative period of the modern world and all seeking a convincing answer to fundamental questions. When does life begin? When can a human being first be described as such so that his or her killing is a crime punishable by the maximum penalty? What is the true role of baptism in the formation of the human person? These are all highly topical questions in an age like our own where belief is subject to the powerful assaults of scientific research and new questions are being raised about the essence and the limits of human existence.
This is a translation from the original Italian publication 'Dare l'anima' (Einaudi 2005).
Translation by Hilary Siddons.
Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe
This volume contributes to current discussions of the place of relics in devotional life politics and identity-formation by illustrating both the power which relics were thought to emanate as well as the historical continuity in the significance assigned to that power. Relics had the power to ‘touch’ believers not only as material objects but also through different media that made their presence tangible and valuable. Local variants in relic-veneration demonstrate how relics were exploited often with great skill in different religious and political contexts. The volume covers both a wide historical and geographical span from Late Antiquity to the early modern period and from northern central and southern Europe.
The book focuses on textual iconographical archaeological and architectural sources. The contributors explore how an efficient manipulation of the liturgy narrative texts iconographic traditions and architectural settings were used to construct the meaningfulness of relics and how linguistic style and precision were critically important in creating a context for veneration. The methodology adopted in the book combines studies of material culture and close reading of textual evidence in order to offer a new multidisciplinary purchase on the study of relic cults.
Kings of the Street
Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence
For more than a century the artisans and labourers of Renaissance Florence turned the city into their own ‘empire’ during times of public festivity. From the republic of the late 1400s through to the grand duchy of the early seventeenth century up to forty brigades of men called the potenze or powers elected kings carved out territories and entered into a dialogue with citizens and with their Medici patrons.
This study traces the rise and fall of this carnivalesque subculture for the first time. It describes how workers represented themselves their neighbourhoods and their trades on the public stage through rituals such as stone-fighting and jousting and reveals how the politics of this festive world were closely linked to everyday patterns of social bargaining around the person of the prince. In the early 1600s the micro-states of the potenze were partially suppressed and they gradually disappeared from the Florentine urban stage. The account of this transformation presented here shows how Tridentine reform and economic crisis combined to undermine hypermasculine carnival ritual as a language of civic contract confining the potenze to making pilgrimages to shrines and convents in the Florentine countryside. At the same time it is shown how economic and religious change empowered groups of artisan women to take up the model of the potenze in order to make their own collective pilgrimages outside the city walls.
Through the story of the potenze this book provides fresh insights into the dynamics of class and gender relations and the nature of agency in early modern Italy.
Witchcraft, Superstition, and Observant Franciscan Preachers
Pastoral Approach and Intellectual Debate in Renaissance Milan
This book offers a new and innovative approach to the study of magic and witchcraft in Italy between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Unusually this subject is explored not through inquisitorial trial records or demonological literature but through the sermons and confession manuals produced by Observant Franciscan friars focusing on the so-called ‘pastoral’ approach to folklore superstition and witchcraft - an approach that appears to have been notably less harsh than that taken by inquisitors and dedicated demonologists.
Central to this research are the writings of a number of friars active at the friary of St Angelo’s in Milan. Among them were preachers and confessors such as Bernardino Busti who treated superstition as part of a model that categorized the beliefs and behaviours of the faithful as well as dedicated intellectuals such as Samuele Cassini who took scepticism towards elements of belief in witchcraft still further ultimately leading to a clash with groups such as the Dominicans.
By considering the writings of these men in their wider literary and pastoral context and in the light of the broader reforming aims of the Franciscans this unique study not only offers new insights into the late medieval understanding of superstition and witchcraft but also makes an important contribution to the history of pastoral care.
Bruno the Carthusian and his Mortuary Roll
Studies, Text, and Translations
As founder of the Carthusian order Saint Bruno of Cologne († 1101) is known as a leading figure in the twelfth-century religious renewal. As recent research has emphasized he was also one of the first proponents of a new intellectual culture of the French schools as a teacher at Reims before his conversion and retreat to the Italian hermitage of La Torre.
Various contrary aspects of his life are commemorated in his mortuary roll a unique document that was sent around churches and monasteries of Europe upon his death by his fledgling hermit community. Over 150 entries by individuals and monastic or clerical communities in Italy France and England mostly in verse survive in an early sixteenth-century text witness.
In celebrating Bruno’s life and saintly death the many-voiced entries comment upon intellectual and religious ideals illustrating literary practices and intellectual and spiritual values as well as the pragmatic workings of memoria. The present edition includes all materials accompanying the sole surviving sixteenth-century print of the roll. It offers complete translations into English and into German and includes five studies by experts debating the most important aspects and contexts of this singular and multi-faceted medieval text.
Nature, Virtue, and the Boundaries of Encyclopaedic Knowledge
The Tropological Universe of Alexander Neckam (1157-1217)
Can - and should - an encyclopaedia be a repository of all knowledge? Does the idea of total encyclopaedic knowledge constitute a boon for readers or is it a labyrinthine nightmare? This book explores the pleasures and paradoxes of encyclopaedism viewed through the interpretative lenses of the works of Alexander Neckam (1157-1217) an English Augustinian canon and scholar. Neckam wrote not just one but two encyclopaedias: the prose De naturis rerum (‘On the natures of things’) and the verse Laus sapientie divine (‘Praise of divine wisdom’). Poised between the end of the ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth century and the scholasticism-inspired thirteenth century Neckam invites us into an unfamiliar universe in which encyclopaedias are intentionally incomplete and in which warnings about the vanity of knowledge coexist with vivid descriptions of new technological inventions. This strange union is facilitated by the exegetical method of tropology or moral reading. Through analogy vivid imagery and constant recourse to ethics Neckam’s encyclopaedias aim to educate their readers until they leave the text behind and engage in a reading of the world in a quest for knowledge experiencing not only its pleasure and beauty but also its inherent power.
Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100-1230
This study charts the evolution of the ideology of holy war and crusading in medieval Poland through Polish incursions into the Baltic the last bastion of paganism in Europe. It traces the transmission of the idea of holy war and crusade to north central Europe explaining its impact on political and religious life in Poland and Polish missionary and crusading activity in Prussia Pomerelia and Pomerania. Holy war and crusade helped influence state formation politics and dynastic succession. Key mechanisms by which the idea of holy war was transmitted to Poland are examined and compelling evidence is provided that the Polish elites were highly familiar with and receptive to the idea of crusade. The Polish elites were deliberate participants in Christian holy wars and undertook various crusading activities during the twelfth century. The influence of the idea of holy war on the actions of the Polish dynasts and the central role of women in the establishment of family traditions of participating in crusading are examined in some detail. Furthermore this book explores the conditions that enabled the cause of the Christianization of Prussia to be taken up by the Teutonic Order by tracing the divergence of the idea of holy war in the Piast realm away from the norms of Latin Christendom in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This work offers new perspectives for international studies of warfare sanctioned by religion.
Mulieres Religiosae
Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Traditionally women were denied access to positions of official religious authority within Christianity and were therefore compelled to explore other avenues to acquire and express spiritual leadership. Through twelve case studies covering different regions in Europe this volume considers the nuances of what constituted female spiritual authority how it was acquired and manifested by religious women and how it evolved from the high Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. Whilst current scholarship often emphasizes binaries within the fields of gender and religious authority this volume examines the manifestation of female religious authority in its multiple facets. It looks both at individuals displaying exceptional forms of agency such as prophesying as well as more commonplace communal activities such as letter-writing and music-making. By taking into account the pervasiveness of spirituality in society as a whole in the Pre-Modern era this collection of essays renegotiates the relationship between the spiritual and the social domain. Through the chronological organization of the contributions insight is gained into the changes in the means and forms female religious authority could take between 1150 and 1750. The narrative is clearly impacted by late medieval enclosure policies and by changing modes of spirituality. Whereas women in the earlier period tended to represent themselves as a door through which God could advance towards mankind later on they functioned more frequently as a portal through which others could advance towards God.
Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s 'Sermons on the Song of Songs'
Performing the Bride
In this analysis of Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous Sermons on the Song of Songs gendered imagery is treated for the first time as an interpretative key. Through close readings of Bernard’s text and through the rich array of recent medieval studies on sex and gender this book challenges familiar interpretations of body gender and asceticism disrupting the commonplace view of medieval monasticism as desexualized and un-gendered.
Bernard not only interprets but also embodies or actualizes the figure of the bride generating images of celibacy as erotic pleasure and monks as fecund and female. Through his performance Bernard provides a hermeneutical model on which he patterns himself and his audience the Cistercian choir monk. By analyzing the rhetorical functions of Bernard’s female self-representation the author explores how complex and varied female images in the text are absorbed into the bridal role - lactating mother ecstatic virgin weeping widow needy girl.
By appropriating femaleness Bernard transformed the Cistercian cloister into an inverted world that anticipated eschatological restoration and salvation. In this parallel monastic reality the book argues males performed all parts while gender hierarchy was upheld to establish notions of superior and inferior worldly and heavenly humility and sublimity. The male-female duality in this language is not one of equality but was rather forged into a hermeneutical hierarchy in which ultimately a fully Christomimetic man both appropriates and negates femaleness.