Viator

This article investigates the front cover of the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000), a luxury Gospel book produced in 870 for Charles the Bald, king of West Francia (r. 843–77) and Holy Roman Emperor (r. 875–77). It argues that the cover’s pictorial program and meaning conform to the Neoplatonic theology of John Scotus, known as Eriugena (ca. 810–ca. 877), the master of the Palatine School and the author of the miniatures’ captions inside the manuscript. The article then analyzes the message of the treasury binding and its relationship to the two full-page miniatures near the beginning of the book, which represent the enthroned Charles the Bald facing the Twenty-Four Elders adoring the Lamb (fols. 5v–6r). The luxurious three-dimensional binding is an extension of the pictorial program inside the manuscript. It simulates Christ’s physical presence in the Gospel book’s materiality and stresses the scripture’s sacramental meaning. It constitutes a threshold, allowing Charles the Bald to access a sacred space, be it the manuscript’s text block, which is a virtual extension of Christ’s body; the Aachen Palatine Chapel; or, ultimately, the Heavenly Jerusalem. The article thus demonstrates that the cover introduces the king to the salvific effect of the Gospels, purifying his sense of sight, which was blinded by sin, and allowing him to make spiritual communion with God. In this scenario, together with the illuminations inside the book, the cover’s imagery points Charles toward an anagogical contemplation to be accomplished through the materiality of the Codex Aureus, whose ultimate goal is the edification of the king’s soul, allowing him to anticipate the spiritual rewards of the future.

Since the pioneering scholarship of Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull in the last decade of the twentieth century, studies of crusader motivation have primarily focused on the early crusading movement, above all the First Crusade (1095–99), and have privileged a specific source type: charter evidence. Comparatively little attention has been afforded to the topic of crusader motivation in the thirteenth century, with a lack of scholarly consensus regarding the source material and methodologies that historians should utilize and prioritize. This article proposes that greater engagement with the history of emotions—specifically, the methodological approach of “intimate scripts,” which emphasizes the ability of literature to teach patterns of feeling and elicit emotional responses—offers a path forward. It does so by applying this framework, devised by Sarah McNamer in 2010 but largely neglected by historians, to the Chanson de Jérusalem: the third instalment in the triptych of Old French chansons de geste set during the First Crusade, known collectively as the central trilogy of the Old French Crusade Cycle. By scripting emotion, it is argued, the Jérusalem would have not only taught prospective crusaders how to feel and how to perform their feelings on crusade, but potentially also garnered actual emotional responses from listeners—emotional responses that may well have triggered crusade participation.

This article reexamines the evidence for the intellectual life of Montecassino in the central Middle Ages, by interrogating a key text: Peter the Deacon’s De viris illustribus casinensis coenobii. This catalogue of the greatest scholars associated with the abbey lists their achievements in the liberal arts. Rather than being read sui generis, this text needs to be set within a longstanding Benedictine tradition. Peter’s catalogue reveals an attempt to reconcile the local achievements of Montecassino with a model of the universal church, as well as rising tensions between eremitical and coenobitic practices. The concluding section examines the historiographical implications of this argument for our understanding of eleventh-century Montecassino, and suggests that the label of a “golden age” would not have been welcomed by Peter himself.

In 1187 the sultan Saladin (1138–93) famously won a victory at the Battle of Hattin that enabled him to conquer most of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In response, the rulers of the Latin West launched the Third Crusade (1187–92), one of the largest and most elaborate expeditions in the history of the crusades. Scholars of the period have explained the intensity of crusader sentiments in the Latin West through reference to the sense of trauma that gripped Europe after the news of Hattin, and they have shown how Saladin himself became the focal point of polemical crusade propaganda. But Saladin’s reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187 remains a relatively unexplored topic of scholarly inquiry. This essay offers an analysis of three Latin chronicle accounts composed between circa 1170 and 1186, in order to ascertain the sorts of claims Latin Europeans made about Saladin and his family before Hattin. These three chronicles (by Lambert of Wattrelos, Geoffrey of Vigeois, and Robert of Torigni) offered salacious accounts of events in the East, which made use of the same exotic storytelling devices that we can find in contemporary epic and romance. The independence of these accounts suggests that gossip about Saladin had, after crossing the Mediterranean, coalesced into an international set of recognizable tropes. Many of the chroniclers’ details about Saladin and his family anticipate the polemical claims that promoters of the Third Crusade advanced about the sultan after Hattin. Such echoes are significant because they suggest that preexisting perceptions about Saladin helped shape the reaction to Hattin, encouraging disdain and contempt for the sultan among the inhabitants of the Latin West. Scholars should therefore regard the culture of exotic storytelling about “Saracens” in the East as being among the long-term causes of the crusade. At the same time as these early rumors about Saladin encouraged outrage in the West and violence in the East, they also established literary themes about the sultan’s life that would persist in the literature of later centuries, by which time Latin European authors had reimagined Saladin as a chivalric hero.

This article focuses on the depiction of the soil by Gerald of Wales in the Topographia Hibernica. It explores how Gerald blends topographical and ethnographic descriptions of Ireland and its people in order to construct a civilized, Christian manner of interacting with the soil and with subterranean resources. By portraying the Irish as deficient in their exploitation of Ireland’s sacred and fertile soil, Gerald constructs a rhetorical justification for conquest that links spiritual reform to agricultural reform. Associating Irish natural resources with the history of saintly miracles reframes the conquest of Ireland as a crusade to liberate a sacred landscape from the neglect shown by the contemporary Irish inhabitants. Similarly, Gerald portrays Angevin domination as divinely sanctioned through stories of miraculous subterranean emergences. The Topographia Hibernica synthesizes topographical, historical, and hagiographical traditions in order to express how the spiritual and cultural condition of a people is intertwined with their relationship to soil.

The present article documents and discusses the most common musical encounters between Jews and Christians in medieval France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. It argues that, as two simple everyday activities that span not only the religious and mundane but also the merry and macabre aspects of everyday life, singing and dancing serve as an effective case study to address how Jews and Christians both culturally shared and distinguished themselves in the European Middle Ages. By illuminating how song and dance were fluid across the various arenas of Jewish and Christian life, the following will demonstrate how a focus on these and other everyday activities can reveal the range of relations that existed between Jews and Christians in both thought and practice. It aims to enrich the field of medieval musical culture by synthesizing Latin and vernacular texts with rabbinic, Hebrew sources, a corpus that has not yet been brought into the discussion of medieval song and dance.

This paper explores the possibility that a fifteenth-century work on astronomy, the Tabulae Waradienses, was not written by George of Peuerbach, as was previously thought, but by his disciple John Regiomontanus. The starting point is a note by one of the readers of a manuscript containing this work suggesting that the work was Regiomontanus’s, and the main part of this study considers and compares the attributions and contents of this and several other manuscripts. The findings give us reason to believe that the readers who read the Tabulae Waradienses in manuscript copies believed that Regiomontanus did write this work, but that he did so by appropriating Peuerbach’s older work on eclipses. After establishing this, the paper considers the possibility of this being true, by studying the relations between Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, and the person to whom said work was dedicated, Bishop John Vitez of Oradea. The conclusion is that there was sufficient opportunity for the work to be written by either author, but if the readers who attributed it to Regiomontanus were right, the latter would have probably written it in mid-1461, immediately after his teacher’s death.

This article seeks not only to examine the measures taken by the papacy to provide financial support for the Spanish Reconquest, but also to assess how much importance it attached to war in the Peninsula in comparison with other conflicts that had papal support. The Spanish clergy were expected to contribute to papal taxes and subsidies for the Holy Land, the Latin Empire, and other purposes. Popes were, however, on several occasions prepared to agree that Holy Land taxes collected in the Peninsula should be used there; but similar diversions were also made elsewhere for various purposes. The papacy was reluctant to impose new mandatory taxes for warfare against Muslims in Spain, although it did seek some subsidies from the clergy in the Peninsula for this purpose. Yet it was more ready to impose mandatory taxes for some other conflicts, such as the struggle against heretics and warfare against papal enemies in the West. Subsidies were also granted for these undertakings. Whereas taxes and subsidies for other purposes were often collected over a wide area, the money assigned by the papacy for the Spanish Reconquest came only from the Peninsula; and Iberian rulers could, of course, demand their own taxes from both clergy and laity. At times popes did seek to further the Reconquest by providing other financial assistance, including money derived from the redemption of crusading vows and the profits of usury. They also occasionally allowed tercias to be used, and made only half-hearted attempts to stem the appropriation of these by Iberian rulers. Yet only the Baltic region was less favored than the Iberian Peninsula.

This article examines medieval dance from the perspectives of colonization and otherization. As this study shows, the encounter between European Christians and foreign (i.e., non- European and non-Christian) dancers resembled an exercise of (proto)colonization with the rise of the Crusades and long-distance travel in the late Middle Ages. Representations of dance in crusader chronicles and medieval travel literature from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, I argue, entangle dancers’ skill and entertainment value with colonial violence and Christian hegemony. For instance, crusading contexts praised Muslim dancers as marvelous spectacles, yet at the same time relegated them to war booty and critiqued Islam. Europeans who traveled through Asia reframed Mongols’ vast wealth and empire with depictions of sexually available and obsequious entertainers. Artwork that accompanied travel writing represented dance as a more extreme form of otherization, in which dancers evoked subhumanity. The colonial appetite for plunder occasionally involved medieval dance, as the African ivory trade reveals. In sum, this article contributes to a larger study on the global Middle Ages and embraces a postcolonial approach to medieval studies and dance studies.