Viator

In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Zoroastrian priesthood of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate composed a number of texts foretelling the end of the present cycle of creation and the beginning of the next. While these predictions are not entirely harmonious, they all speak of future restoration of a Zoroastrian Ērān (the setting of the Iranian epic/religious tradition, later appropriated by Sasanian imperialism) under a royal hero. In some of them this hero is named Kay Wahrām. Kay Wahrām has a number of similarities to an apocalyptic figure of the Christian tradition: the Last Roman Emperor. Indeed, a recent argument has considered both characters as evidence that a powerful eschatological ideology animated both the Roman and Sasanian empires in the sixth and seventh centuries. This article will take a deeper look at the themes and contexts of the Middle Persian apocalyptic narrative and the seventh-century incarnations of the Last Emperor. It will argue that while the two characters do indeed have a great deal in common, these commonalities are very likely to have arisen from predictable, scribal responses to parallel ideological shocks triggered by the rise of Islam.

Gunzo of Novara’s letter to the monks of Reichenau (Epistola ad Augienses), in which the author responds to a slight against him perpetrated by a monk of Saint Gall in the form of a lengthy invective, has rightly been seen as an important witness to the intellectual culture of the late tenth-century Latin West. This paper carefully examines the contents of the letter and advances two further arguments: (1) the letter should be understood against the background of the classical doctrine that style and character were intimately related; and (2) attention should be paid to the role of the monks of Reichenau in plying Gunzo with information and possibly prompting him to write in the first place, particularly given the tensions between Saint Gall and Reichenau at the time that the letter was written.

With his translation and expansion of Manuel des peches, Robert Mannyng wanted to guide both a lay and a clerical audience in their understanding of sin and engagement with confession. To do so he had to navigate various contrasting demands, such as exposing clerical shortcomings without driving parishioners away from their religious leaders, or teaching on sins of the tongue without inciting his audience to commit them. This paper shows that Handlyng Synne, Mannyng’s carefully constructed penitential text, achieves its aims, to a great extent, by employing different modes of speech representation, which allow him to foreground or background information as required. The discussion explores how the varied representation of speech facilitates the audience’s strong emotional connection with the text, as well as the delivery of Mannyng’s pedagogical message and the avoidance of potential pitfalls. Reaching a novel understanding of the functions of speech representation in the text is made possible by the application of a specially adapted framework for the study of the many different ways in which speech could be reproduced in medieval texts. With this comprehensive approach, this paper moves beyond the narrower focus- common in previous scholarly work on the text-on direct speech as a narrative technique simply aimed at making the text more appealing to a lay audience used to being entertained by oral narratives.

Though chapel inspections were common occurrences at medieval churches and cathedrals, records of their findings rarely survive. The set of draft chapel inventories at the center of this study provides, therefore, important insight into the distribution of medieval liturgical objects across a large set of altars and helps us to imagine the common appearance of these important spaces within the sacred topography of medieval cathedrals. And yet, because they are short, repetitive, and cropped, the seventeen draft records of chapel inspections compiled at Burgos Cathedral in 1369 appear, at first, as mere clerical ephemera. However, a closer investigation of their text and form reveals much useful information about the appearance of medieval altars. The inclusion of various supplemental snippets of information-such as the identification of altar dedications (some recorded here for the first time), names of compilers, and legalistic declarations of testimony-imbue them with narrative color and thus open a window into the practical concerns and administrative processes underlying their compilation. As incomplete inspection records, these inventories also provide snapshots of the cathedral’s side altars as they appeared in the fourteenth century, drawing attention to objects infrequently considered representative of medieval altars and highlighting the messy and multifaceted business of cathedral life.

While royal pageantry, civic entries, and visitations have long been a source of fascination, scholars have devoted comparatively little attention to the mechanics, financial burdens, or local implications of planning and orchestrating these events. This article draws on overlooked archival materials from the Catalonian city of Tortosa to reconstruct and contextualize a number of ceremonial royal visitations that took place over a tumultuous decade between the early 1370s and 1380s. It makes the case that, even with the comparatively modest festivities produced by smaller cities and towns that often were underappreciated by the honorees, the crushing expenses borne by municipalities in staging them cast a shadow over their fiscal health and operations for years to come and influenced the manner in which these events were anticipated, experienced, and recollected by local leaders and residents.

Numerous technical instructions (“recipes”) survive in Middle English from circa 1350 to circa 1500 that describe the preparation and dyeing of hides and skins. The recipes are summarized here with examples. A technical interpretation is proposed for the terms bazene, cheverel, and lasche, words rarely attested elsewhere. Bazene and cheverel are seen to be imitations of more expensive products. Lasche was defined by its red color. Technical and terminological parallels are identified with contemporary recipes from continental Europe. Techniques described in the recipes may be traced back to at least classical Alexandria; sources suggest red as the high-status color for leather since the first millennium BCE. Skins dyed red on only one side were particularly favored for book bindings, a preference also originating in Alexandria.

This article interprets the enigmatic phrases above two Ptolemaic world maps printed in 1482, one above the world map in the Venice edition of Pomponius Mela printed by Erhard Ratdolt, and the other in the world map in Francesco Berlinghieri’s verse adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geography. Ratdolt’s map is updated with recent geographical discoveries, and the phrase above it emphasizes this aspect of the map, which might otherwise be ignored in a map illustrating a classical author. In fact, there is considerable tension between the map and its context. The phrase above Berlinghieri’s map encourages an astrological contemplation of the world, and I suggest that Berlinghieri coined it for a manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography (BnF, Latin 8834) that he made for Matthias Corvinus (1443-90), king of Hungary and Croatia, who was an astrology enthusiast, and then retained it in the world map in the printed version of his verse adaptation of Ptolemy’s work.

This paper examines Ławryn Piaseczyński’s diplomatic manual and its origins in the context of the author’s three consecutive diplomatic missions to Crimea on behalf of the Polish king, revealing the issues of diplomatic contacts with non-European cultures and the practice of gift-giving in late Renaissance diplomacy. I demonstrate how this hitherto unexplored text stands out from other Renaissance treatises and manuals on diplomacy and how Piaseczyński’s unique diplomatic experiences in Crimea informed his writing. In order to achieve this, I analyze the structure, style, and contents of the Powinności poselskie (Ambassador’s duties), and point out the features that distinguish it from other similar works in Poland and western Europe. In the final part of the article, I establish the correlation between some specific episodes from the author’s Crimea missions and the content of his manual. This analysis allows for the completion of fragmentary data about the origins of the Powinności poselskie and for the correction of previous findings, such as narrowing the manual’s date of composition.

Zoological motifs, omnipresent in medieval and early modern cartography, are extremely rare, and thus particularly noteworthy, on Ptolemaic maps. This article argues that three species of quadrupeds depicted on the Tabula Europae IV in Venice editions of Ptolemy, published several times between 1561 and 1599, reveal the performative role of zoological imagery in Renaissance scholarship. Each motif bears a label of alces (elk), urus (aurochs), or bisons (wisent), evoking associations with Caesar’s Gallic War. The designs, in turn, find models in the revised edition of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia (1550). The identities of the three animals, however, remained obscure, given the variety of other names, descriptions, appearances, and references to different places in both earlier and contemporary accounts. At the same time, the figures of alces, urus, and bisons set off widely ramified chains of zoological, geographical, philological, and historical associations of Ptolemy and Caesar with Munster and Conrad Gessner, and of ancient Hercynia and Sarmatia with early modern Prussia, Scandinavia, and Muscovy.

Balthasar Russow’s Chronica der Prouintz Lyfflandt (1578) is a masterwork of the Low German narrative tradition and the most important account of the Livonian War of 1558-83. This article explores how Russow conceptualized warfare. I first propose that his preoccupation with divine providence is not incompatible with a more politically and militarily grounded understanding of events. I then examine his accounts of arms trafficking and the battlefield impact of new technologies, before turning to his descriptions of armaments and armed men. I suggest that Russow’s treatment of these more technical dimensions of warfare reveals much about the mindset of a sixteenth-century chronicler striving to render a complex struggle comprehensible to a broad readership.