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Abstract: It hardly bears repeating that Christian perceptions of Jews became increasingly negative during the later Middle Ages. A widely shared sense that Jews represented a growing threat to Christian communities prompted the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to decree that Jews must be clearly marked and identified by a distinctive garment or badge in order to prevent illicit sexual encounters between Jews and Christians and especially between Jewish men and Christian women.1 Despite the Council’s initiative, in 1239 Pope Gregory IX complained in a letter to the bishop of Cordova that the Jews there do not wear a badge on their clothing and pass themselves off as Christians.2 David Nirenberg has examined the growing concern ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nine discrete manuscripts, contained in four codices, transmit the repertory of Aquitanian versaria that establish Saint-Martial de Limoges as one of Europe’s most renowned centers of learning and cultivation of the arts from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries.1 Jacques Chailley underscores the centrality of drama to Saint-Martial de Limoges’s liturgical culture, describing its abbey as “un des centres les plus importants de la lyrique latine paraliturgique” [one of the most important centers of paraliturgical Latin lyric].2 Among these manuscripts, the codex Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds Latin 1139 is quite literally a puzzle, pieced together from multiple fascicles with arguable changes in scribal ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Addressing Birgittine nuns at Syon Abbey, the anonymous translator of The Orcherd of Syon offers the following advice to readers approaching the text:whanne ʒe wolen be conforted, ʒe mowe walke and se boþe fruyt and herbis. And albeit þat sum fruyt or herbis seeme to summe scharpe, hard, or bitter, ʒit to purgynge of þe soule þei ben ful speedful and profitable, whanne þei ben discreetly take and resceyued by counceil.1[when you wish to be comforted, you may walk and see both fruit and herbs. And although some fruit and herbs seem to some sharp, coarse, or bitter, yet they are very beneficial and profitable for the purging of the soul when they are taken discreetly and received with instruction.] The two prologues ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What happens at the end of Pearl makes all the difference to what the entire poem means. Does the mourner come to a hard-won knowledge of self, other, and God' Does he grow from self-centered grief into a deeper love of his daughter, coming to love rightly'The final stanzas sum up the poem’s trajectory and contribution. Scholars are far from unified on their meaning. Some take the Jeweler as maximally transformed in Eucharistic contemplation and religious ecstasy (e.g., Ann Astell, Jane Beal, Theodore Bernanos, Cecilia Hatt). Other scholars see him as consoled by his heavenly vision and reconciling himself to his struggles (P. M. Kean, D. W. Robertson, J. R. R. Tolkien). Others regard the Jeweler as protesting his ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Lives of female mystics are unique sources for our understanding of the spirituality and devotional practices of medieval religious women. So the rediscovery and translation of a relatively unknown work, The Life of Christina of Hane, is an exciting opportunity to enlarge our understanding of female mystical spirituality and its reception in the thirteenth century. Christina (1269–92') was a nun in the Premonstratensian convent of Hane, in the Rhineland Palatinate. The text of the Life survives in a single manuscript copied around 1500 in the Mosel-Franconian dialect (now Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, MS 324). This translation is based on the edition of the Life published by Racha ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The characterization of Middle English biblical translation as “experimental” will not come as a shock to readers familiar with narratives in which it features as a threat to ecclesiastical authority, and the forerunner of the English Reformation. This thoroughly researched and well-presented monograph inverts this characterization—and challenges the persistent stereotype of medieval scholastic commentary as fundamentally derivative—by reframing biblical translation in fourteenth-century England within the category of scholastic commentary, and reframing scholastic commentary itself as “experimental” (6). The positioning of English interpretation in relation to Latin exegesis has an obvious pertinence to Wycliffite ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Megan Murton offers her readers the illuminating opportunity to dwell imaginatively within the highly performative nature of Chaucer’s prayers. For Murton, who anchors Chaucer’s Prayers in the new critical approach to first-person voice in late medieval writing, the “I” of prayers is both a space to be inhabited in devotional posture or else as vantage-points onto, or into, a story. Therefore, to perform Chaucer’s prayers, whether pagan or Christian, is to participate imaginatively and affectively in his narrative worlds, and to experience the different kinds of religious devotions promoted by them. To adopt the “subject-position” as readers submit themselves to Chaucer’s influence should guide their imaginative ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: D. Vance Smith states succinctly the central thesis of his new book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England: “literature and dying are inextricably linked” (4). Summarizing it effectively is more challenging. Let me begin by describing Smith’s definitions of “literature” and “dying.” Smith views literature through a formalist lens as a self-contained mode of language, though like a deconstructionist, he asserts that meaning is indeterminate and unity deferred (5). He differentiates “literature” from theology and philosophy, noting it is “neither a prayer nor a proposition” (1). However, Smith approaches the second term “dying” with a philosopher’s subtlety. He incorporates ideas from Aristotle to ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Katherine Allen Smith’s new volume provides much food for thought to scholars of the European Middle Ages. The book is a study of the narrative accounts of the first crusade, works written between 1099 and the call for the second crusade in 1146. But it is a study with an unusual twist for the twenty-first century: Smith argues that the narratives of the crusade should be understood in the context of biblical exegesis rather than “just” as history. The result is a highly interesting work that should be essential reading for anyone who teaches or studies the crusades. Beyond that already significant audience, however, Smith provides a fascinating lens to make those who study or teach medieval texts reassess the ways ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1230 Matilda de Bernham claimed she had found Edward, son of Master Benedict, a Norwich physician, lamenting and saying that he was a Jew. Moreover, she accused the city’s Jews of trying to retrieve the boy by force, calling him “their Jew.” Four years later, Master Benedict, who had not actively searched for Edward, accused the Jews of circumcising him. There followed both legal proceedings and attacks on Norwich Jews and their property. Some Jews fled elsewhere, and three moneylenders were condemned to be hanged. A church court awarded Master Benedict land and a house owned by Jews. Edward, who was five years old in 1230, then nine, was made to undergo physical examinations as part of the proceedings. The ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Pore Caitif is an anonymous late fourteenth-century Middle English work of religious instruction and devotion written expressly for the laity, male and female readers alike. Known only in its manuscript form—and there are now known to be fifty-four extant (including twenty-eight with the full text in addition to a plethora of others with fragments)—until Sister Mary Theresa Brady wrote her doctoral dissertation on it at Fordham University and successfully defended the same in 1954, its content and importance were familiar to relatively few scholars.Now, with this publication of a fine edition of Paris, BN Anglais 41 (modestly subtitled “avec introduction, notes et glossaire”) by Karine Moreau-Guibert, the Pore ... Read More PubDate: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
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