Late Middle Ages (c. 1300-1500)
More general subjects:
La voix de son maître
Les hérauts d’armes au service des ducs de Bourgogne (1363-1519)
Le héraut d’armes est un personnage incontournable du Moyen Âge occidental. Spécialiste des tournois présent au côté du prince lors des grandes cérémonies constamment sur les routes pour porter des lettres aux différents souverains il est aussi l’un des meilleurs connaisseurs de la noblesse occidentale.
L’émergence de ces officiers dans la société de cour est fulgurante. Apparus à la fin du XIIe siècle au sein du groupe des jongleurs et des ménestrels ils se mettent dès la fin du XIVe siècle au service des grands seigneurs des villes et des princes pour devenir au dernier siècle du Moyen Âge une véritable institution en France en Angleterre ou en Bourgogne.
Les Pays-Bas bourguignons offrent sans aucun doute un des meilleurs exemples de l’épanouissement de l’office d’armes au sein d’une cour médiévale. Véritables porte-voix du duc chargés de prononcer les déclarations de guerre et de publier la paix les hérauts sont omniprésents dans la conduite de la guerre ou dans la diplomatie de Philippe le Bon et de Charles le Téméraire. Baptisés du nom de provinces bourguignonnes vêtus de leur cotte d’armes ils représentent l’État bourguignon autant que le duc lui même jusqu’à en devenir son avatar.
Massa Marittima (1470-1500)
Essai sur les ressources naturelles en Toscane
Cet ouvrage vise à explorer les modalités d’exploitation des ressources naturelles dans la Maremme siennoise – autour de la ville de Massa Marittima – à la fin du Moyen Âge. La séquence chronologique resserrée permet d’embrasser une ample documentation (urbaine notariée) provenant de différents fonds archivistiques ou des données archéologiques et d’étudier ensemble un large panel d’activités rurales artisanales et industrielles qui jusqu’alors n’avaient pas toutes été analysées ensemble. La période retenue (1470-1500) correspond à un moment de basculement marqué notamment par la reprise de la production métallurgique par l’essor de la production d’alun et par des bouleversements politiques majeurs qui affectent l’État siennois (avec notamment la mise en place à partir de 1487 d’un régime oligarchique). Les ressources sont au coeur des relations nouvelles qui se nouent entre les Massétans et désormais les élites siennoises qui entendent tirer profit de nouvelles richesses. L’ouvrage entend proposer un aperçu des modifications sociales politiques et environnementales qui confèrent un destin singulier à la Maremme.
Communicating the Passion
The Socio-Religious Function of an Emotional Narrative (1250–1530)
This volume investigates the vivid and emotionally intense commemoration of the Passion of Christ as a key element in late medieval religious culture. Its goal is to shed light on how the Passion was communicated and on its socio-religious function in late medieval Europe. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach the volume analyses the different media involved in this cultural process (sermons devotional texts lively performances statues images) the multiple forms and languages in which the Passion was presented to the faithful and how they were expected to respond to it. Key questions concern the strategies used to present the Passion; the interaction between texts images and sounds in different media; the dissemination of theological ideas in the public space; the fashioning of an affective response in the audience; and the presence or absence of anti-Jewish commonplaces.
By exploring the interplay among a wide range of sources this volume highlights the pervasive role of the Passion in late medieval society and in the life of the people of the time.
The Power of Words in Late Medieval Devotional and Mystical Writing
Essays in Honour of Denis Renevey
This volume honours Denis Renevey's contribution to late medieval devotional and mystical studies via a series of essays focusing on a topic that has been of central relevance to Denis's research: the power of words. Contributors address the centrality of language to devotional and mystical experience as well as the attitudes towards language fostered by devotional and mystical practices. The essays are arranged in four sections: 'Other Words: Figures and Metaphors: treating the application of the languages of romantic love medicine and travel to descriptions of devotional and mystical experience; 'Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus; considering the deployment of words and the Word (Jesus) as powerful images in devotional practice; 'Testing Words: Syntax and Semantics; exploring the ways in which medieval writers stretch the conventions of language to achieve fresh perspectives on devotional and mystical experiences; and 'Beyond Words: The Apophatic and The Senses; offering novel perspectives on a group of texts that address the difficulty of expressing God and visionary experience with words.
The volume's global purpose is to demonstrate the attractions of an explicitly philological approach for scholars studying the Christian tradition.
Accountability in Late Medieval Europe
Households, Communities, and Institutions
This volume brings together studies of late medieval accountability in both the domestic and the public realms. It traces practices of accountability across the social spectrum from households to small businesses to communal and regnal administrations highlighting the intersections between competing conceptions of personal and institutional responsibility. Focusing on France and Italy from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries the case studies follow territorial officers consular agents and town notables co-opted into local governance from Avignon and Marseille to Tuscany and the Venetian and Genoese overseas territories. The studies explore both personal and institutional accounting registers as well as records of a textual nature such as rulebooks and inquests in an effort to reflect the range of records and procedures relied on to achieve a measure of accountability in late medieval Europe.
The Multilingual Dynamics of Medieval Literature in Western Europe, c. 1200–c. 1600
While the multilingualism of the medieval world has been at the forefront of research agendas across medieval studies in recent years there nonetheless remain many questions to answer. What for example were the stakes and consequences of multilingualism for literary culture? And how do these change if we think of multilingualism through cultural social artistic or material lenses? Taking such concerns as their starting point the essays in this volume address a variety of aspects of medieval literature and literary culture related to multilingualism. They deal with multilingualism in relation to manuscripts literary contexts and historical contexts. The chapters gathered together here address considerations that have been overlooked in previous scholarship and ask where the future of the study of medieval multilingualism lies. Contributions to the volume are grouped thematically rather than by date or period in order to draw out comparative perspectives with the aim of encouraging innovative new approaches to future research in the field.
Dante the Theologian
Pierre Mandonnet
The Dominican master par excellence of the historical method Pierre Mandonnet (1858-1936) came to Dante as one of the leading Thomists and medievalists of his generation. However his monograph Dante le théologien (1935) was neglected and largely forgotten mainly as a result of the lay historian Étienne Gilson’s book-length refutation in Dante et la philosophie (1939).
This new edition and the first English translation re-presents Mandonnet’s erudite and thought-provoking monograph to contemporary scholars and Dante enthusiasts. It includes a critical introduction that situates Mandonnet’s work in relation to prevailing currents of Dante scholarship in the early twentieth-century and outlines how it might invite a reappraisal of central features of Dante’s thought today. Mandonnet’s historically-informed account of Dante the theologian as a preacher doctrinarian and distinctively medieval poet as well as his sophisticated analysis of the theological purpose method and content of the Commedia will be an invaluable resource for anyone who seeks to understand Dante’s works and their highly contested reception history.
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.
Les visages du cardinal
Construction et transformations de l’identité symbolique et matérielle du cardinalat à la fin du Moyen Âge et sous la première Renaissance
Le cardinalat depuis la fin du XIVème siècle jusqu’au début du XVIème siècle est une entité en transformation rythmée par les crises successives que traverse l’Eglise d’Occident. Ces crises et les transformations socio-culturelles du Quattrocento ont amené les théoriciens du cardinalat – qu’ils soient juristes théologiens ou diplomates – à reconsidérer à la fois la place et les modes représentation des cardinaux influençant également leur incarnation matérielle et en nous laissant de riches témoignages sur leur réflexion. L’étude présente entend analyser le développement les transformations et les perceptions des représentations symboliques et matérielles de l’identité cardinalice idéale depuis le Moyen Âge tardif jusqu’à l’orée de la Réforme. Les éléments mis à jour sur la construction et les mutations de l’identité cardinalice idéale correspondent parfaitement au phénomène transitionnel associé à ce siècle. Le cardinalat apparaît à travers l’ensemble des sources comme un palimpseste sur lequel se réécrit constamment les empreintes de sa construction symbolique matérielle et théorique chaque couche laissant des traces visibles à celui qui en fait la lecture. Les formes de représentations pérennes qui définissaient le cardinalat et qui apportaient à la fois une justification sacrée et politique par la revendication d’origines prestigieuses finissent au Quattrocento par s’étioler ou se transformer pour laisser place à de nouvelles formes. Ces « couches successives » forment tout entières cette identité cardinalice qui ne peut se concevoir que de façon multiple par la diversité et la richesse de son développement.
The Materiality of Medieval Administration in Northern England
In the late Middle Ages the Percy earls of Northumberland and the bishops of Durham were two of the largest landholders in the North East of England. This book is a study of their estate administrations based on the extant manorial accounts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Examining the documents holistically it investigates the shapes of the records and the materials they were written upon as well as how they were used and stored to provide new insights into late medieval lordly administration. Such a material-focussed approach explores the concurrent use of rolls booklets paper and parchment for different types of manorial accounts and at different steps of the multistage production and audit process. It also examines the hands drafting editing and auditing the accounts in addition to the layout and presentation of the contents of the records to further our understanding of the written burden of proof required in the management and audit of large estates in late medieval England. Studying the financial accounts of the earls of Northumberland and the bishops of Durham from a material perspective reveals two highly sophisticated administrative systems and structures of accountability.
Gerson rhénan
Itinéraires culturels et circulation des textes dans l’Europe rhénane, XVe-XVIe siècles
Chancelier de l’Université de Paris Jean Gerson (1363-1429) est surtout connu comme théoricien de la théologie mystique et par son action réformatrice au sein de l’Église pendant les années difficiles du Grand Schisme où il joua un rôle de premier plan. Or si la carrière universitaire et l’action politique de Gerson font de lui un intellectuel parisien l’évidence de la transmission manuscrite et imprimée désigne sans équivoque le Rhin supérieur comme la région où la diffusion des œuvres du chancelier a été la plus foisonnante. Intervenant à une échelle comparable à la diffusion manuscrite des œuvres de Thomas d’Aquin le rayonnement de l’œuvre de Gerson a ceci de spectaculaire qu’il dépasse largement le milieu universitaire et qu’il se déploie en moins d’un siècle. Le paradoxe reste pourtant intact de pourquoi l’Allemagne et non la France s’impose comme le lieu de rayonnement de l’œuvre de Gerson dans des proportions aussi importantes quantitativement ? Pour répondre à cette question l’étude de la réception de l’œuvre du chancelier ne peut pas faire l’économie d’une réévaluation de la tradition manuscrite et imprimée des 15e et 16e siècles à partir des témoins préservés dans les bibliothèques du Rhin supérieur. En privilégiant le cas de Gerson comme point d’observation ce volume se propose de renouveler les perspectives de l’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle dans le long 15e siècle en focalisant sur l’histoire des textes les conditions et les circonstances de leur transmission afin de dresser une cartographie des réseaux de communication dans la région rhénane dans les décennies qui entourent l’invention de l’imprimerie.
Principia on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
Exploring an Uncharted Scholastic Philosophical Genre Across Europe
Principia were an obligatory step on the medieval university path to becoming a master of theology. As inaugural lectures on the four books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard they provided the first opportunity for a scholastic to defend a philosophical-theological worldview. These lectures were also a way for the theologian now a sententiarius to present himself and to make a name for himself initially by delivering in a speech an introduction to the course and by debating with his fellows. The present book takes a collective approach to offer a survey of the evolution of the genre mapping the dissemination of this exercise during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries across Europe.
As an academic exercise principia bridge ideas texts authors and institutions across time. Exploring the corpus of surviving principia illuminates the philosophical creativity cultivated in the faculties of theology. The papers in these volumes thus not only discuss the structural aspects of principia but also treat the philosophical and theological ideas defended and attacked during the principial debates and the topics and imagery used in the speeches.
The various chapters delve into the surviving material in a common attempt firstly to assemble pieces of evidence from Paris and Oxford into an image portraying how when and by whom the principia were performed in the first European universities. The second part illustrates the spread of the genre to the new faculties of theology in Central Europe and Italy with case studies from Bologna Cracow Florence Heidelberg Prague and Vienna highlighting the pan-European diffusion of the practice.