Viator

In the early Middle Ages, the public commemoration of recently deceased persons served to shape the immediate political future. In royal and noble circles, the creation and issuance of charters in the wake of death helped stave off potential discord by forging new political bonds and publicly confirming the legal transfer of significant holdings. This article analyzes this dynamic of immediate postmortem commemoration in two tenth-century kingdoms, late Carolingian Francia and the Ottonian Empire. In these realms, Queen Gerberga and Empress Adelheid advocated for recently dead allies to ensure their memory persisted through their intercessions and interventions in confirmation charters. In doing so, these royal women used the deaths of fideles both within and, more intriguingly, outside of their family circles to shore up their own political aims and consolidate their political futures. Examining these moments of potential crisis illuminates how early medieval queens and empresses acted as agents of memory indispensable to the earliest stages of commemoration. It equally demonstrates how rulers seized on the afterlives of their allies to perpetuate existing networks of social relations and promote belief in the justice of their rule.

This article examines a twelfth-century game of cat and mouse between a monastic priory and its seigneurial dependents in the villa of La Chapelle-Aude (Berry, France). The monks asserted a broad range of customary rights over the economic lives of the village dwellers, one of which was the obligation to bake bread in the lord’s oven. The priory’s customs, purportedly confirmed in the 1070s by the archbishop of Bourges, include a stipulation about not using a kind of home-cooking device—called a trapa—to bake bread in circumvention of the lord’s monopoly. Lexicographers have misunderstood this piece of material culture, which has led scholars to overlook a rare piece of evidence for indirect passive resistance to seigneurial lordship, and for the indirect documentary means with which lords defended their prerogatives in response. The customs charter was a twelfth-century forgery, a pseudo-original, which envisioned this material workaround as something the prior had foreseen and prohibited from the start. This unusual case of back and forth allows us to see how both sides—domination and resistance, as well as middlemen—resorted to indirect tactics rather than open conflict. By combining insights from social and economic history, food studies, paleography, diplomatics, and social theory, this case study offers wider insights about indirect tactics and material culture in seigneurial relations.

The principality of Antioch was a medieval frontier polity of great complexity, one whose territorial extent waxed and waned considerably during the twelfth century. Subject to interest from several external polities, the principality’s ruling Frankish elites had to adopt a dynamic approach to relations with their neighbors in order to maintain their status and power. This article seeks to shed new light on the means by which they did so through the prism of Thomas Nail’s 2016 Theory of the Border, and so to explore what this new critical lens can offer to the study of premodern borders and frontiers. By examining, in particular, the role of castles in defining and maintaining Antioch’s extremities, it argues that, as key points for directing the flow of human movement, fortresses could indeed act as distinct, if not impermeable, borders, and that a new approach to understanding what a border could be provides important new avenues for studying medieval frontiers.

Focusing on the form and function of the letters between Britain and Rome in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, this article argues that these fictional documents appropriate models of classical rhetoric to contest Roman authority and establish British sovereignty. Tracing the origins of ars dictaminis in the twelfth century, this article examines how the letters in the Historia conform to or challenge the principles of medieval letter writing. By analyzing the form and style of these letters, this article demonstrates that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative of British history is constructed at the intersections between classical rhetoric, history, and medieval epistolography.

This essay focuses on the perception of Arabic writing in Italian art between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, mostly through an analysis of the peculiar phenomenon known as pseudoscript. This pseudoscript seems to imitate and evoke the Arabic alphabet in terms of formal features, but it is often unintelligible in terms of content. I will discuss five case studies of illegible script in specific association with their text field: on thresholds, on hems and borders of luxurious garments, around sacred figures, in marginal areas, and on frames. I will demonstrate that, far from being simply “all Arabic,” script could retain very different nuances of meaning and function, depending on whether it was considered in terms of its shape, its constituting material, or where it appeared. Even the notion of illegibility was consciously manipulated to suggest different levels of secrecy of the message: obscure as magical writing, secretive as the power of the monarch, intimate as a prayer in one’s heart, marginal as an artist’s mark, and mysterious as a riddle.

In her 1385 testament, a noble Neapolitan widow instructed that she was to be clothed in a new Dominican habit on her deathbed, and that subsequently this habit should be given to the friar who had served as her confessor and executor. In turn, he would provide his old habit to clothe her for burial. It was not exceptional for a pious fourteenth-century layperson to seek to die and be buried wearing the habit of a religious order, but this kind of postmortem clothing exchange was highly unusual. After briefly surveying medieval customs of death and burial in religious habits, this article analyzes the habit swap in the context of several other medieval cultural trends, including charitable gifts of clothing, close relationships between holy women and their (often mendicant) confessors, the use of clothing and textiles as contact relics, female-to-male crossdressing in religious contexts, and the use of items of dress as tokens of earthly and/or spiritual love.

This essay argues that the glosses in the late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century Middle English work þe Myrrour of Symple Soules are more theologically coherent than has previously been posited. Focusing on the discussion of “usages” that they contain, as well as on the importance of freedom, a case is made for reading many of the annotations as advocating a Thomist/ Bonaventurean account of deification, that is, an account of deification in which the soul loves God through a created habitus that allows the Holy Spirit to work in it through participation without obliterating it. Although a more theologically conservative understanding of deification than usually posited of the original Mirouer, it is argued that the translator demonstrates concern that his readers understand what it means to be deified in union with God, and as such sets out to offer them more than a “rhetoric of ecstasy.”

This paper examines a unique group of four crusader-period underground churches in Famagusta. The dedication, dating, and religious significance of these shrines are discussed in a regional context, using historical and archaeological sources. Two extramural churches attracted veneration from Latin and Greek communities: St. Mary de la Cava was a pilgrimage site managed by Greeks from Sinai, while the second grotto was originally a Latin edifice with a well providing holy water (agiasma). Inside the walls, an underground church, perhaps owned by the Melkites, had two altars and entrances, suggesting that it was possibly a pilgrimage shrine venerated by two religious communities. The fourth church, dedicated perhaps to the Nativity, is half built, half cut into the rock in a manner resembling the grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Although the preserved shrines cannot be identified with certainty, this study indicates that they were important religious centers, which developed together with the growing Latin-ruled metropolis and had devotional, architectural, and institutional links with other pilgrimage shrines in Cyprus and the Levantine mainland.

The biblical Ishmael’s descendants appear as the Kedarines in The Secrets of Natural History, a French translation (ca. 1380), illustrated in all surviving manuscripts, of Pierre Bersuire’s Reductorium Morale book 14, on the wonders of the world. Bersuire’s Reductorium was written in a climate of revived crusade apocalypticism and official hatred of Islam. Features of the violent, monstrous, and cannibal Gog and Magog enclosed by Alexander the Great are blended with the SNH’s description of the Eastern desert Ishmaelite Kedarines. Both Bersuire and his French translator employed elements of this legend in developing the region of Cedar (Kedar) to further papal propaganda (especially during the pontificates of Clement VI and Innocent VI at Avignon). Moreover, in the SNH, qualities of animality, political and sexual aggression, and links to the Antichrist given to the Kedarines are also characteristics of Muhammad and his followers in hostile medieval Christian biographies.

The juxtaposition of two sixteenth-century religious groupings, one in western Europe, the Anabaptists, and one in Japan, Jōdo Shinshū (then called the Ikkōshū), helps to make sense of the seeming contradictions present in the commingling of violence and its refusal by Jōdo Shinshū. The two traditions were both beholden to a binary that contrasted the outside world (including secular law and its claims) to the sect itself. This engendered two apparently contradictory reactions: either dismissing the world while not confronting it and its claims, or taking up arms to confront this same world. For Anabaptism, what long prevented the apprehension of this binary logic was its confessional historiography (which ended up rejecting armed violence and turned pacifist) and fragmentation. In the case of Jōdo Shinshū, it was the canonization of Rennyo’s teachings. His pastoral letters (ofumi) ultimately called for respect for authorities and forbade armed rebellion. This voice has been taken as the sole authentic representative of the tradition out of which he came, whereas there must have existed varied understandings stemming from the opposition buppō-ōbō (Buddhist Teachings and Teachings of the Realm), including some that logically led to defending the sect with arms. The complexity of earliest Anabaptism, in particular in relation to secular authorities and warfare, thus helps to make sense of Jōdo Shinshū’s seeming confused and inconsistent late medieval history, during which armed leagues of devotees and calls to respect authorities and the claim to be peaceful coexisted.