Viator

The Paris version of the Chanson de Roland attests two unique details witnessed by no other texts of the Roland tradition. This article examines these unique aspects-Ganelon’s donning of an Islamicate helmet and Thierry’s amended kinship-and sheds light on their importance. These details and amendments further complicate the Roland tradition’s representation of Christians and Muslims, serve to interrogate the determination of treason, and probe ideological fracture and recuperation. The poem’s racialization of Ganelon and recuperation of his kinship group emphasize how subtly and flexibly premodern texts deploy strategies to mark difference and belonging.

Sometime around the year 1110, an ambitious schoolmaster named Geoffrey of Gorron borrowed some copes from the monastery of St. Albans as costumes for a St. Catherine play. Disastrously, a fire destroyed the copes and with them Geoffrey’s ambitions: unable to reimburse the cost of the copes, Geoffrey offered himself to the abbey in recompense and, in time, rose to become its abbot. That, at least, is the narrative extrapolated from the Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani and repeated by virtually every study of Geoffrey and of his now more famous friend and confidante, Christina of Markyate. This article argues that we have taken the story of Abbot Geoffrey and the burnt copes too literally for too long, and that the accepted interpretation of the Gesta abbatum’s presentation of this incident has prevented us from reading the work of the linked themes of copes and cloaks across the Life of Christina of Markyate and the St. Albans Psalter as a rhetorical element in the fashioning of Geoffrey’s abbatial persona.

After the death of their founder and first prioress, Lucy (d. ca. 1225-30), the members of her community at Castle Hedingham, Essex, circulated a mortuary roll to memorialize and request prayers for their beloved leader from religious houses in their confraternity. Opening the mortuary roll is a frontispiece with three scenes featuring the priory’s patron saints, the ascent of Lucy’s soul to heaven, and her funeral, with her body lying in a bier, surrounded by the presiding priest, clerics, and her fellow sisters. This tribute to Lucy is the earliest extant illustrated mortuary roll and contains one of the few artistic representations of vowed religious women from medieval England engaged liturgically, but it has yet to receive scholarly attention as a liturgical artifact. This article examines Lucy’s mortuary roll alongside contemporary rituals for the dead in order to recover the liturgical activities performed by the members of Lucy’s community and others to care for her soul at her funeral, after her burial, and on the anniversary of her death. Viewed through these rituals, Lucy’s mortuary roll is rightly seen as both a reminder and a repository of the spiritual benefits her sisters at Castle Hedingham believed she needed to gain heaven.

The Old Occitan Vida of Provence’s founding beguine, Douceline of Digne, recounts violent tests conducted on her raptured body by the local laity. This essay assesses how the hagiographer crafted a narrative of the violent testing conducted by Charles of Anjou upon Douceline’s raptured body in such a way that it evoked other descriptions of violent rituals or violence against holy objects. First, by examining the role of violence in the revelation of truth in the ordeal and judicial torture, I argue that the hagiographer portrays Douceline’s body as relic being authenticated before an audience. Second, by comparing the description of the characters who perpetrate violence in Douceline’s Vida and the contemporary 1290 Paris host-desecration narratives, I argue that the violent test in the Vida served to connect Douceline and her community, the Ladies of Roubaud, with the House of Anjou. Moreover, the narrative offered comfort to these beguines during a time when the threat of persecution loomed large due to their connection to the Spiritual Franciscans and broader beguine movement. This essay concludes that by evoking certain aspects of ritual and sacramental violence, Douceline’s hagiographer linked Douceline, and thus her community, to the House of Anjou. This connection to political power resulted in practical protection for the beguines as well as offered the readers of the Vida assurance in the face of concern about the survival of their way of life.

Starting in the thirteenth century, at dozens of diocesan synods and provincial councils throughout western Europe, clerics turned their attention to the problem of noise. Wielding their power as lawmakers, bishops promulgated new canons and statutes that penalized certain acoustic behaviors in their jurisdictions. In these ecclesiastical noise regulations, we find noise defined in various ways and with many different sources: chatty parishioners, barking dogs, street-performing priests, raucous hunters, urban protestors, and even non-Christian subjects. Existing traditions (biblical, patristic, monastic) had much to say about the virtues of silence, but they cannot entirely explain this new interest in legally suppressing certain sorts of sound. We can only understand the appearance of ecclesiastical noise regulations by considering two related phenomena: new duties for local priests and a clerical push to sacralize the public sphere. Scattered across a variety of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, mostly issued entirely in isolation from each other, and owing little of their substance to anything in the higher juristic tradition, episcopal noise regulations are a case study in legal innovation and convergent evolution. So too they show that the later medieval church’s on-the-ground authority sometimes demanded the silencing-literally-of local rivals.

Unlike its immediate sources, French dits amoureux by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart that privilege love adventure, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is centrally concerned with illness and healing and the ways that they shape embodied experience. The medicalized attention Chaucer’s poem brings to the narrator’s insomnia in particular reveals connections to both contemporary natural philosophy and hagiographic miracle collections, which sometimes included insomnia among conditions cured through saintly intervention. In the Book of the Duchess, sleeplessness is a canvas for an immersive meditation on the body, its creative processes, and problems of identity, or “what me is” (line 31). Looking beyond the French courtly register that has dominated critical interpretation, this essay reframes Chaucer’s poem in its contemporary intellectual context as an early instance of “illness narrative,” drawing methodological support from theories of intertextuality as well as the sociology and ethnography of illness. The poem’s healing trajectory, differently relevant to the dreamer, the Man in Black, and White, ultimately affirms the communicative movement from self to other and the therapeutic value of empathy as necessary conditions for the poet’s creative agency.

This article proposes a new reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron that highlights how the text shares the form and outlook of two central elements of contemporary documentary culture: the notarial register and the civic peace pact. By privileging a comparison to the law as practiced rather than as theorized, this reading complicates the generic divisions between documentary culture and early Italian literature. The form, textual horizon, and even the author’s own literary biography invite us to understand compositio in both law and literature as fundamentally oriented toward the future, toward the truth on the horizon, rather than mired in deliberations on the past. Boccaccio himself exploits legal frames in several of his tales to accent the generative potential inherent to realist literature and therefore to the civic horizon as well.

This essay explores a meaningful countertrend to the prevailing hostility toward prophetic women in the fifteenth century. In particular, within the Holy Roman Empire, some supporters of the Council of Basel (1431-49) spoke out in support of prophetic and visionary women. They averred not only that women could prophesy but that they were more likely than men to receive visions during the troubled times in which they lived. This essay investigates the way that disillusionment with clerical authority during and after the Council of Basel led to the clerical defense of female visionaries. As a result of this disillusionment, advocates for Birgitta of Sweden and other female visionaries justified women’s gifts by referring to them as outsiders and associating them with conciliarism and radical reform. Such advocacy appears in the writings of several clerical reformers: Heymericus of Campo (1395-1460), Jacobus of Jüterbog/Paradiso (ca. 1381- 1465), Vincent of Aggsbach (ca. 1389-1464), the anonymous writer of a treatise on Antichrist (1454), and the anonymous writer of Sentimentum super Infestationem Turcorum (1459). This essay interrogates the arguments employed to justify female spiritual gifts and the context in which these justifications were made. These arguments would continue to frame opportunities for women to exert spiritual authority not only in the fifteenth century but also in the confessional battles of the following centuries.

This article reinterprets a sultan’s letter in Middle English and shows its connection to a list of military resources that follows that letter in their manuscript. Moreover, it discusses their relationship to analogous texts in Middle French, which are identified here for the first time. A brief review of past work on the genre of sultans’ letters and the first full edition of the list of military resources help the reader follow my argument. I give robust support to a previous scholar’s claim that the English documents originated as Burgundian crusade propaganda and show that the French documents must have had the same origin as the English ones. This article will interest crusade historians, manuscript studies scholars, and researchers into fifteenth-century culture, history, literature, and military technology.

In the early seventeenth century, for the first time, the monarchies of England and Scotland were associated with the legendary figure of the Last World Emperor, an eschatological ruler who would purify the Church, defeat Islam, and bring peace and justice to the world before the end of time. This essay will focus on the first British royal figure to be the subject of widespread apocalyptic expectations: Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales (1594-1612). Prince Henry died at the age of eighteen, and many of the elegies mourning his premature death revealed their authors’ hopes that he would have fulfilled the role of a Protestant Last Emperor by destroying the “two Antichrists,” the Papacy and the Turks.